


Sincerely, Your Close Friend and Sworn Rival

by suspiciousflashlight



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: AU: girls volleyball, F/F, I am here to preach the good word and the good word is butch nb lesbian daichi, but otherwise generally canon-compliant or at least not explicitly non-canon-compliant, kuroo is a Hot Mess encased in a thin and fragile veneer of smooth-talking, rivals (platonic) to rivals (romantic), statistically insignificant terrible sex, third years in university
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29433165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suspiciousflashlight/pseuds/suspiciousflashlight
Summary: Before Kuroo has made it through her first full week of university, her life has already been derailed by a new and all-consuming purpose: beat Sawamura Daichi at Statistics I ordie trying.
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou/Sawamura Daichi
Comments: 43
Kudos: 51





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't planning on posting anything for Valentine's Day, but this was serendipitously ready just in time! long before my gf and I were dating, she used to steal my keys and wrestle me to the floor in the hallway of our res building every time we came back from the dining hall, which is possibly why I find kurodai's rivalry-romance dynamic irresistible. also.... yknow..... **girls**
> 
> thank you as always to citrine: grand beta master, narrative structural engineer, emotional support EMT, wlw enthusiast

“You’re never going to believe this, Kenma,” says Kuroo as she slams open the door to Kenma’s bedroom, Bokuto right on her heels. “Guess who’s in my Statistics I lecture? Guess. _Guess_.”

Kenma’s eyes stay fixed on her _Dark Souls_ run, tracking the movements of all the characters with laser precision as she clears another round of combat. “Is it Sawamura Daichi?” she asks, and slashes an ugly demon right in the face.

“It’s Sawamura Da—wait,” says Kuroo, deflating slightly. She stares at Kenma in astonishment and demands, “How did you know?”

“Well, Shouyou told me a couple months back that Sawamura was going to Todai, so…” Kenma shrugs.

 _This—_ this is a betrayal of the highest order, as if Kenma just unsheathed a comically large video game sword and combo-attacked Kuroo right through the back, her Nekoma hoodie offering precisely zero AC. Kuroo clutches at her chest; Bokuto, utterly insensitive to Kuroo’s plight, dodges around Kuroo’s bony elbows and inches past her into the room to sprawl on Kenma’s bed.

“And you didn’t bother to, I don’t know, _tell me_?” splutters Kuroo.

“I thought you would have asked her yourself,” says Kenma, still not bothering to look up. “Since you’re friends. And since you’re obsessed with her.”

“I am _not_ —”

“Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure Shouyou told me that too, actually,” says Bokuto. She yawns, and pulls a Kit Kat out of her bag, ripping the wrapper open contemplatively. “I wish I was in Statistics I. I wanna see Sawamura again…”

“You’d fail. Don’t eat chocolate on my bed,” says Kenma. Bokuto grumbles, but she begrudgingly slides off Kenma’s bed and onto the floor.

“Unbelievable. Both of you. _Unbelievable_ ,” says Kuroo, shaking her head. She takes Bokuto’s place on the bed and watches over Kenma’s shoulder as her Chosen Undead takes on Pinwheel with all his freaky, spindly arm thingies. Yes, okay, Kenma is _technically_ correct to suggest that Kuroo could have come right out and just _asked_ Sawamura about her post-high-school plans herself, but to suggest this is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of her passionate rivalry with Karasuno’s ex-captain. Theirs is a relationship grounded in taunting smirks, bone-crushing handshakes, and the unspoken understanding that they are always, at all times, every second of the day, in everything they do, competing with each other.

“Kuro, please be normal,” asks Kenma. “She just moved to Tokyo. She’s probably lonely. Don’t freak her out.”

“Do you think she’s good at stats?” asks Kuroo, only half-listening. “I’m good at stats, but I could be better. I _have_ to be better. To beat her.”

“What am I saying, of course you’re not going to be normal about Sawamura…” mutters Kenma.

“Hey, we should ask Sawamura to get rice bowls with us!” says Bokuto.

“I need to crush her into a pulp,” says Kuroo. “A statistically significant pulp.”

“Or katsudon,” says Bokuto. “Mmm… katsudon…”

Kenma just sighs, and pointedly slips on her headphones.

***

After scouring the populations of all her other university classes, Kuroo is reluctantly forced to conclude that Stats I appears to be the only lecture she and Sawamura share. This is clearly an appalling oversight on the part of the registrar’s office, but Kuroo is determined to make the most of the three hours per week she and Sawamura will be required to spend discovering the joys of categorical variables and heteroscedasticity together over the next four months.

(Kuroo obviously does not talk to Sawamura on the first day of class. When she glances across the lecture hall and sees that black-and-white Karasuno track jacket, that boyishly functional crew cut, that focused frown, well—to say she _panics_ would be a gross exaggeration, but she’s certainly _startled_. She reacts in a calm and collected manner, lurching up out of her seat only to realize that the spots on either side of Sawamura are already taken, at which point she sits back down and strategically hides behind her own seatmate to avoid detection. She needs time to regroup. Sawamura Daichi is not the kind of girl whom one can approach with a simple _hey, how’s it going?_ Once the initial shock has passed, Kuroo can recognize the necessity of formulating a plan of attack.)

“My goodness, look who it is,” drawls Kuroo when Monday rolls around with its sacred 2:15-p.m.-to-5:15-p.m. Stats I lecture again. After much deliberation this morning, she has arrived to class in her tightest jeans and her nicest cardigan. It is of the utmost importance that she looks hot for this. “I didn’t realize Todai had started letting in any old country bumpkin smart enough to spell her own name.”

Kuroo slides into the seat beside Sawamura, shoots her a smug smile, and braces for Sawamura to roll her eyes and hit her with a courteously snide comment, already readying a snarky rejoinder. She has their whole conversation planned out in her head, and is thus unprepared for Sawamura to glance over at her and break into a huge grin.

“Kuroo!” exclaims Sawamura, leaning in close—and then, to Kuroo’s astonishment, she twists in her seat and throws her arms around Kuroo in a hug. The angle is awkward, but there is a definite instant in which Sawamura’s chest bumps Kuroo right in the boob, albeit mediated by Sawamura’s baggy sweatshirt. “I didn’t know you went here! I thought you’d settled on Kyoto?”

Kuroo’s brain short-circuits. This is why, instead of responding to Sawamura’s question like a normal human being, Kuroo blurts out the prefab snarky rejoinder she had initially been preparing to deploy. “You look like a Nike store threw up all over you,” Kuroo says bluntly, after which she experiences an immediate and debilitating sense of existential regret.

“What?” says Sawamura. She leans back, her smile fading, and glances down self-consciously at her hoodie, which is, in actual fact, Adidas.

“Want to get rice bowls with me and Kou sometime?” Kuroo asks as she flounders to recover. She tries to lean her elbow on the desk in a laid-back manner, misses, and nearly slams her face into the laminated particleboard.

“Oh, uh, sure,” says Sawamura. “Thanks, that would be really—”

“I was kidding,” says Kuroo, and Sawamura looks at her like Kuroo just reached over and decked her with all five hundred pages of their stats textbook. Oh God. What the fuck? Why did she say that? That was so mean. What the fuck is wrong with her?

“Well, I’m pretty busy anyway,” Sawamura says stiffly, turning to face the front of the classroom, where the professor is getting ready to start the lecture. “So—”

“I meant katsudon,” says Kuroo. Her cheeks are burning hotter than the Great Chaos Fireball Kenma’s Chosen Undead acquired after joining the Chaos Servant Covenant. “That’s what I meant to ask. If you wanted to get katsudon with us sometime.”

Sawamura squints at her, suspicion etched all over her serious face. “Okay…?” she says cautiously. Kuroo, wisely, bites her tongue, and smiles. Kenma has observed before that Kuroo’s smile makes her look like a pervy old man, but for the moment it seems to appease Sawamura, who settles in her seat, sprawling her legs a little as she relaxes, and smiles back.

“How’s your statistics game, Sawamura?” Kuroo asks, slouching artfully. “You’ll be happy to know I offer a friends-and-family discount on my tutoring services, so there’s no need to be nervous.”

Sawamura’s smile goes sharp, showing some teeth, and she gets the gleam in her eye that Kuroo recognizes from their days on opposite sides of the volleyball court, the gleam that gets Kuroo’s heart pumping overtime. “Funny,” says Sawamura. “Math was my best subject in high school. I’m happy to help out if you get stuck.”

Oh, yes. They’re _on_.

***

“So, this is my place,” says Sawamura, and shoulders open the stiff door to her apartment with a grunt that makes certain parts of Kuroo’s body do inappropriate things.

Kuroo and Bokuto follow Sawamura inside, slipping off their shoes as they look around. It’s… small. Well, it’s a Tokyo apartment, and Sawamura’s a university student. Of course it’s small. That’s not the weird part. No, the weird part is…

“It’s nice!” says Bokuto. “You’re moving all your stuff in later, I guess?”

Sawamura blinks at her. “No, I moved in a month ago. I’m pretty settled now.”

“Oh!” says Bokuto. When Sawamura turns to straighten the already-straight stack of textbooks on her table, Bokuto and Kuroo pull faces at each other behind her back. Sure, cleanliness is next to godliness and all, but there’s a difference between _tidy_ and _desolate_ , and Sawamura’s apartment veers alarmingly towards the latter.

It takes some serious snooping to find any real signs of life, but Kuroo is nothing if not dedicated to her craft. Low on the wall, right beside the pillows on Sawamura’s bed, there are a couple of photographs taped up—Karasuno’s team last year, all in their uniforms; Sawamura, Sugawara, Azumane, and Shimizu outside together in their winter coats; Sawamura with two people Kuroo assumes are her parents, surrounded by a bunch of little kids. Wow. Sawamura looks like a perfect fifty-fifty blend of her mom and dad, like some kind of computer simulation. Of course she does. “Are those your cousins?” Kuroo asks, pointing at the kids in the last photo.

Sawamura shakes her head. “No, those are my brothers and sisters.”

“Your parents have _five kids?_ ” Kuroo demands, too shocked to be snide. Aside from Sawamura herself, not one of the Sawamura kids looks older than twelve. This explains so much about Sawamura, _so_ much. The Nekoma girls respected Kuroo when she was their captain, but she never quite managed to inspire in her teammates the gut-wrenching terror Sawamura exercised over Karasuno, where one look was all it took to cow even the rowdiest of them into line.

“Y’know, it’s kinda convenient, how you can reach the kitchen right from your bed,” Bokuto says thoughtfully as she stretches out her arms to measure the distance. “Like if you get hungry in the middle of the night…”

“Yeah, exactly,” says Sawamura.

“That only works if you can cook,” says Kuroo.

“I can cook,” Sawamura says scornfully.

“Right, sure, a lot of people _say_ they can cook, but…” says Kuroo, trailing off in a pointed and antagonistic manner.

“I _can_ cook. Are you saying you don’t think I can cook?”

“Oh, getting a little defensive, aren’t we, Sawamura?”

“Fine. I’ll prove it,” says Sawamura. She leaves Kuroo and Bokuto to sit on her bed while she stands at her cramped stovetop, which gives Kuroo ample opportunity to scrutinize her figure at close quarters from behind, especially her butt, which her sweatpants show off to her advantage. Kuroo has no butt. In fact, Kuroo has almost negative butt. She is flat right up and down, like an eel. This seems unfair. What does Sawamura need all that butt for? Kuroo narrows her eyes and seethes quietly.

About twenty minutes later, Sawamura hands Kuroo and Bokuto each a bowl of fried rice. Kuroo sniffs at it skeptically, then takes a bite. Holy shit. This is the best—no, no, no, hold on a minute. She _almost_ had the thought that this is the best fried rice she’s ever had in her life, but no, obviously that can’t be right. It’s _fine_ , it’s definitely _better than she expected_ , but it’s not the _best_. She takes another bite and closes her eyes. Holy shit, no, actually, this is amazing. Kuroo takes a third bite and seethes even harder.

“Hey, this is great!” Bokuto mumbles enthusiastically around a mouthful of rice, already a third of the way through her bowl, and Sawamura beams as she starts on her own bowl. Then Sawamura glances over at Kuroo—just for a second, but long enough for Kuroo to catch her expression, the way she clenches the corner of lip between her teeth, the way her eyes meet Kuroo’s expectantly.

“Not bad, Sawamura,” says Kuroo. Sawamura jerks her head in a brusque nod, then turns to listen to Bokuto explaining how her sister almost burnt their house down reheating soup that one time. Maybe Kuroo’s delusional (“You’re definitely delusional,” she can hear Kenma saying in her head), but it almost looks like Sawamura’s face has gone just a tiny, _tiny_ bit pink.

***

“You’re never going to believe this, Kenma,” says Kuroo, storming into Kenma’s bedroom. Akaashi is sitting cross-legged beside Kenma, diligently doing homework while Kenma one-shots Hollows; Bokuto is lying on Kenma’s bed, flipping gloomily through a textbook and muttering to herself under her breath. Not having expected an audience, Kuroo hesitates for a moment, but this news is too major to keep to herself. She takes a deep breath and announces, “Guess who’s a lesbian?”

“Isoo Abe, 1865 to 1949?” says Bokuto. “No, wait—Soroku Ebara, 1842 to 1922? No, wait, not lesbians, the other thing… What am I thinking of…?” She covers her face in her hands and groans. “Oh my God, I’m so going to fail this quiz…”

“You’re thinking of _legislators_ , not _lesbians,_ Bokuto-san. Let’s organize your notes together when I’m done this assignment,” says Akaashi. She glances up at Kuroo and says politely, “Is it you, Kuroo-san?”

“Kuro’s bisexual,” says Kenma, the glow of a bonfire checkpoint reflected in her eyes as she starts to level up her Chosen Undead. “Is it Sawamura Daichi?”

“It’s—” Kuroo begins, and then sags, Kenma’s omniscience once again trampling her meticulous sleuthing into the dirt. “You already knew? _How?_ ”

“Because I’ve met her…?” says Kenma, buffing her Attunement.

“She does kind of have a vibe,” admits Bokuto.

“Normally I try to avoid judging people based on their appearances,” says Akaashi, frowning down at her notebook, “but in Sawamura-san’s case I did watch her walk into a door when Morisuke-san did the splits at camp last summer.”

Damn it! Damn Yaku and her stupid stretchy hamstrings! It’s because she’s so short—Kuroo has _twice_ as much leg as Yaku; she can’t just get all that muscle fascia to stretch out so easily—that’s the _only_ reason—it’s not _fair_ that Yaku gets Sawamura staring at her just for doing her fancy little splits—

“Well, anyway, I guess I didn’t know for sure,” says Kenma. “Did Sawamura tell you that?”

“No, she came up on HER,” Kuroo says smugly.

(It happens that very afternoon: Kuroo is at the library, taking a brief break from her economics homework to scroll through the app in the faint hopes of finding a profile for the cute girl with the pigtails who’s surreptitiously eating a burger by the big third-floor windows, when Sawamura’s profile pops up instead, flaunting Sawamura in all her muscular glory. Kuroo responds by doing the rational thing and completely losing her mind, all thoughts of Pigtail Girl instantly banished as she reads through every scrap of information available on Sawamura’s profile. Somewhat to Kuroo’s disappointment, this does not amount to much, Sawamura having filled out the barest of bare minimums. Also, in an unexpected twist, she uses a lot of kaomojis. Kuroo would almost guess that Sawamura wrote it drunk, except that she doubts Sawamura Daichi is the kind of girl who deigns to engage in activities like underage drinking, which have the potential to be too much fun.)

“Interesting,” says Kenma, sounding utterly uninterested. She closes the level-up screen and uses the bonfire to fast-travel to a new location, where she resumes terrorizing the eldritch horrors that roam the map. “I’m sure you handled that well.”

“Ha! Of course I did,” says Kuroo.

(At her desk in the library, she gleefully likes one of Sawamura’s two photos, then immediately panics and deletes the app from her phone.)

“Are you going to ask her out on a date, Kuroo-san?” Akaashi asks.

“Aw, you should, you totally should! That would be so cute!” says Bokuto. “Hey, can I come too? We could get ramen! Akaashi, you want to come?”

“I’m not going to _ask her out_ ,” says Kuroo, staring at her friends in disbelief. Their support is sweet, but also totally misguided. A date—a _date?_ With Sawamura? Yeah, _right_. That’s not how she and Sawamura do things. “I’m going to get with more girls than her and then rub it in her face. Duh.”

“Oh, good,” says Kenma, rolling her eyes. “For a second I was worried you were going to be weird about this.”

***

It’s not that Kuroo spends all weekend agonizing over what to do if Sawamura brings up the fact that Kuroo liked one of the pictures on her dating profile when they see each other in stats on Monday. No. Certainly not. And it’s not that Kuroo spends all weekend neurotically checking her phone to see if Sawamura has sent her a message on HER, which she definitely has not re-downloaded for this express purpose, because she definitely doesn’t do that, either.

“Oh, you’re making dinner again?” her dad says on Sunday evening, when he wanders down to the kitchen. “Tetsu-chan, you know I appreciate it, but you really don’t have to…”

“It’s a valuable life skill,” Kuroo says firmly, pouring some sesame oil in the frying pan, then tapping her phone again in case any notifications have come in since she last checked two minutes ago (they haven’t).

“Right, of course,” says her dad. He coughs. “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but have you considered attempting something _other_ than fried rice? Just an idea…”

“I think I need to really master the fried rice before I move on,” says Kuroo. She plucks a pinch of rice out of the frying pan with her fingers, pops it in her mouth, chews for a minute, and sighs. It’s _fine_ , but it’s not as good as Sawamura’s. She’ll have to keep trying.

By Monday morning Kuroo has resolved to proactively bring up the HER situation herself, so as to establish the conversational terrain to her advantage. Bringing it up herself will clarify that she’s not embarrassed about it in the slightest. Which she isn’t. She puts on her second-nicest cardigan and a bit of lipstick, then decides the lipstick is too much and wipes it off, then changes her mind and puts it on again. She recognizes on a subconscious level that looking hot is, once again, of critical importance.

To her dismay, however, when she arrives at the lecture hall, it is to find that some utter dirtbag has already snagged her usual seat beside Sawamura. She slinks into the nearest free seat a couple of rows behind and proceeds to sulk through the three-hour class, splitting her time between scribbling down notes and staring intently at the back of Sawamura’s head. When the professor dismisses them at the end of class, Kuroo lurks by the door, pretending to look for something in her bag until she can casually ambush Sawamura.

“Good weekend, Sawamura?” Kuroo asks, falling into step beside her as they walk down the hall. She shoots her a sly smile. “Do anything interesting? Any _one_ interesting?”

“What?” says Sawamura. “Uh—no, not really. I worked for most of it.”

“You have a job? Already?” Kuroo asks, her scheduled teasing momentarily derailed by genuine curiosity. They’re only a few weeks into the semester, and Sawamura just moved here. Trust Sawamura to get her life together instantly.

“Yeah, I ref,” says Sawamura. “Mostly for kids. My old coach introduced me to a couple of people in one of the Tokyo youth associations. What about you, did you have a good weekend?”

Ooh, reffing—that’s so cool. Kuroo picks up a couple of shifts a week at the café where her older sister worked when she was in university, and she volunteers with a group that runs volleyball clinics for kids, but reffing, yeah, that’s _pretty_ cool. She can totally picture Sawamura scaring all the little kids into behaving themselves. She can also picture Sawamura in those conservative collared shirts that refs always wear, the heavy polyester ones with the long sleeves and the association logos cheaply embroidered on the chest pockets. She bets Sawamura does the buttons _all_ the way up, right to the top. God, that’s so hot. _Why_ is that so hot? What is _wrong_ with her? When the hell did she let Sawamura crawl into her brain and start tinkering with her hypothalamus?

Sawamura is watching her. Right. She asked Kuroo a question. Okay, Kuroo needs to focus up. She’s not about to let Sawamura and her sexily full-coverage ref’s uniform get the upper hand here. No way. Kuroo smirks down at her and says, “Oh, sure, it was great. By the way, Sawamura, it’s funny, but you’ll never guess which former Karasuno captain I stumbled across on a certain girls-only dating app the other day…”

To her surprise, Sawamura flushes crimson. She rubs the back of her neck and stares at the Todai banner slung across the mezzanine as they walk into the atrium. “Suga set that up for me. I barely even use it,” Sawamura mutters, refusing to look at her.

“Oh,” says Kuroo. She’d been gearing up to tease Sawamura relentlessly, but Sawamura seems so genuinely mortified that now she just feels bad. She casts around for something else to say to fill up the awkward silence. “Suga-chan wrote it for you? That explains a lot. She has a very, hmm, what’s the word… a very _distinctive_ style…”

Sawamura laughs. Then her heavy brows furrow, and she turns that serious stare of hers right on Kuroo. “Wait, if you found my profile, does that mean you… that you’re also…?”

Here’s the thing. Kuroo is perfectly comfortable with herself, or as comfortable with herself as any eighteen-and-a-half-year-old can reasonably be. Her bisexuality is no secret, at least among her friends, and Sawamura is certainly her friend, while of course also being her sworn rival. However, coming out has unfortunately had no discernible effect on her proficiency in talking to cute girls, or cute guys, or cute people in general—a proficiency which is already so disturbingly low that Kenma once suggested Kuroo might want to consider consulting a doctor about it. _Not_ that Kuroo thinks Sawamura is cute, because she obviously doesn’t, because Sawamura obviously _isn’t_ cute, except that she is a _little bit_ cute, just a _tiny little bit_ , especially right now, with her face still all pink and her fingers fidgeting with the drawstring of her hoodie. No, it’s just that Sawamura’s pointed ellipsis threatens to open up certain worrying lines of questioning, such as, for instance, _why were YOU looking at MY profile on a DATING app, KUROO TESTUROU??_

Kuroo considers all of this while Sawamura stares. Sawamura’s expression us unusually unguarded, maybe even a little—no—yes?—a little hopeful? No, no. That can’t be right. But—? No. Best not to pursue that line of thought. So Kuroo, who is not panicking, decides that her best bet is to do the mature thing and immediately attempt to bail. She glances down at her wrist, realizes she’s not wearing a watch, and forges bravely onward anyway, telling Sawamura, “Wow, would you look at the time? I have to go—”

“Wait!” says Sawamura.

She grabs the strap of Kuroo’s bag and hauls her back before Kuroo has a chance to slink away. Sawamura takes a deep breath, as if she’s psyching herself up for something. Kuroo starts to sweat, her palms getting damp and clammy, perspiration beading on the back of her neck. What—is Sawamura going to—she wouldn’t, would she? Right here? Right _here?_ And then—and then Sawamura’s grip on the strap tightens, until she’s tugging Kuroo down to her own height, and Sawamura leans in close, and then—

—and then she whispers in Kuroo’s ear, “What does it mean when a girl asks if you’re tachi? I didn’t know, so I just said yes.”

Kuroo laughs until she sobs. She laughs until she nearly pukes. She laughs until she’s clutching at Sawamura to keep herself upright while Sawamura tries to shove her off, scowling the infamous Sawamura Scowl, snapping, “Stop laughing and just tell me what it means already!”

“It’s a position, Sawamura,” Kuroo gasps, when she’s capable of speaking again. Her elbow is hooked around Sawamura’s neck; despite her obvious irritation, Sawamura has ceased trying to push her away. The heat from Sawamura’s skin radiates through the loose knit of Kuroo’s cardigan, warming her all the way down to the pit of her stomach.

“Oh yeah?” says Sawamura, her eyes lighting up. “For what? Soccer? Basketball? I haven’t heard of it before.”

“ _No_ , Sawamura, it’s for—it’s for—” Kuroo looks at Sawamura’s interested, earnest face, only a couple inches from her own right now, and confronts two ontological challenges. The first is that she cannot say the word _sex_ in front Sawamura, for medical reasons, primary among which is the certainty that doing so will cause her to dissolve into a puddle of androgen-riddled goop. The second is that there are pranks and then there are _pranks_ and then there are _Pranks_ , and that this opportunity, which has practically set up itself, transcends all three categories. “It’s for baseball,” says Kuroo, struggling to keep a straight face as she makes peace with the fact that she is fundamentally a bad person.

“Baseball, huh?” says Sawamura, nodding, as if having random girls ask her what position she plays on the diamond seems like a reasonable method of flirting to her sports-addled brain. “I figured it was something like that. Thanks.”

***

Kuroo _loathes_ running with Bokuto, although she personally feels that _loathes_ is too gentle a verb. Kuroo was in great shape in high school, fully capable of always running just _slightly_ ahead of Yaku during team jogs to rub in her superior height, and she has remained in great shape in university—and yet she still, _still_ absolutely _despises_ running with Bokuto. This is because Bokuto runs like she just heard that the Yoshinoya around the corner has a two-for-one special on its extra-large beef bowls but is closing in thirty seconds. Bokuto can maintain this breakneck pace indefinitely, and her face is set in a big, goofy grin the whole time, as if she’s actually enjoying herself, while Kuroo wheezes along beside her, struggling to keep up without choking on her own bronchioles. And since the start of April, when Bokuto joined Todai’s competitive volleyball team? Oh, it’s _unthinkable_ , it’s _heinous,_ it’s _inhuman_. She’s only gotten _worse_.

So when Sawamura mentions before stats one day that she misses having a running buddy, Kuroo drapes herself casually across the desk and says, “Well, you’re always welcome to tag along with me, Sawamura—if you think you can keep up.” She figures she has nothing to lose, being already acclimatized to running with a literal demon, but plenty to gain, namely an opportunity to show off her incredible stamina while also getting to see how much beefier Sawamura’s thighs have gotten since high school when Sawamura dons her running shorts.

“I guess I’ll just have to try my best,” says Sawamura, and hits Kuroo with a predatory smile that prompts her to spend the entire lecture stewing in a lust-fueled haze, through which the finer points of finite population correction percolate only occasionally.

Kuroo meets Sawamura at the park by Kuroo’s house the next morning at 8:00 a.m. By 8:03 a.m., she realizes she has made a terrible mistake. Sawamura does not run like Bokuto. No. Bokuto, for all her faults, runs with the unrestrained joy of a Labrador retriever puppy on steroids. Sawamura, by contrast, runs like she’s spent the past fifteen years of her life training for the single-minded purpose of avenging herself upon the villain who murdered her entire clan right in front of her eyes as a small child. She doesn’t listen to music. She stares straight ahead. She regulates her breathing with metronomic precision. And she _books it_ , her pace cruel and unfaltering, her toned calves bulging above her unfashionable athletic socks.

With Bokuto, Kuroo can at least clutch at the back of her sweater and gargle something incoherent that roughly translates to “please slow down for a minute before I die.” But with Sawamura? Not an option. No way. No way in hell. She must keep up. She must make it look effortless. Anything else is tantamount to admitting defeat to Sawamura, and while continuing to match Sawamura’s pace may result in Kuroo straight-up dying _physically_ , admitting defeat to Sawamura would result in Kuroo straight-up dying _psychologically_ , which is vastly worse. And so Kuroo staggers along beside Sawamura, doing her best to pretend that this is nothing more than a light jog for her while her lungs attempt to turn themselves inside out.

When they finally make it back to the park where they started and slow to walk out a couple of cool-down laps, Sawamura’s chest is heaving, her grey hoodie stained dark with sweat under her arms and down her back, her cheeks rosy with exertion. She bends to drink from a water fountain: her throat bobs as she swallows the water down; her hoodie rides up at the back to reveal the plain black shirt she’s wearing underneath. She straightens up when she’s done, dragging the back of her hand across her mouth, and Kuroo’s knees wobble, but _purely_ because her muscles are dying, and for no other reason _whatsoever_.

“That was nice,” says Sawamura, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. “Same time Thursday?”

Kuroo’s entire cardiovascular system cringes and says _PLEASE NO, ANYTHING BUT THAT, PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD_. Kuroo’s mouth smirks and says, “You’re on, Sawamura.”

“How about we add in some hill sprints next time?”

“Ooh, I don’t know. Can your short little legs handle that?”

Sawamura rolls her eyes and shoves Kuroo, sending her staggering sideways. Kuroo retaliates by hip-checking Sawamura into the bushes. While Kuroo laughs at her, Sawamura extricates herself from her bush, shedding spindly twigs and tiny leaves as she gets to her feet, and lunges for Kuroo, grabbing her around the waist and tackling her to the ground. There follows a wrestling match on the grass that Kuroo, for one, finds _extremely_ exciting—particularly when Sawamura grabs Kuroo under the armpits and pins her on her stomach with one knee pressed into her back. Kuroo twists around to shoot Sawamura her most salacious smile and says, “What now, Sawamura?” which flusters Sawamura enough to allow Kuroo to heave her off. That makes it another win for Kuroo, as far as she’s concerned. She’s not above playing a little bit dirty.

***

“So how’s life as vice-captain treating you?” Kuroo asks. Her hands grow steadily clammier inside their cheap plastic gloves as she flips some of Kenma’s hair out of the way and starts painting the bleach mixture onto a new section of hair.

“It’s fine,” Kenma says, and sighs. Her gloom permeates the Kozume kitchen, rolling off her skinny, towelled shoulders in dolorous waves, so heavy that Kuroo could swear the petals of the orchid Kenma’s mother keeps on the table are wilting right in front of her. Kuroo’s gloved hands are covered with bleach mixture, but Kenma is planted in front of her right between her legs, so Kuroo squeezes her knees against Kenma’s hips in the best approximation of a hug she can manage right now.

She knows exactly what’s got Kenma so down right now: Karasuno didn’t make it through inter-high, losing out to some other school in their prefecture in the semi-finals. They’ll get another shot to qualify for spring nationals in the fall, of course, but that will be Kenma’s very last chance to play Hinata (and the rest of Karasuno, but mostly Hinata) in an official game before Kenma graduates.

“Hey, don’t worry. I’ll tell Sawamura to get down there and whip her old team into shape,” Kuroo promises.

“In between bouts of gloating, I’m sure,” says Kenma.

“Of course not,” Kuroo says huffily. “I can’t be smug about it until you and Fukunaga get our girls qualified here. I realize that’s only a matter of time, but it’s the principle of the thing. Besides, Sawamura is deathly ill with a mild cold right now. Gloating would be unsporting.”

“Oh? Are you going to go stand outside her window doing jumping jacks to rub in how healthy you are?”

“No!” Kuroo protests. She tugs Kenma’s hair in reprimand, but only gently. “Kou and I are going to bring her something to eat to nurse her back to health.”

Kenma twists her head slightly so she can cast a suspicious glance at Kuroo over one shoulder. “Really? That’s surprisingly nice of you…”

“What do you mean, _surprisingly?_ I’m a very kindhearted person.” Kuroo dips the brush in the bleach mixture again, scraping off the excess on the side of the bowl, and starts on a new section of hair. “Now do you think we should take Sawamura okayu or nabe? I want something that says _personally I can’t relate because my own immune system is god-tier but I hope you feel better soon_.”

“That’s more like it,” says Kenma.

***

“You’re never going to believe this, Kenma,” Kuroo mumbles into her phone. She sniffles and buries her head in her pillow, trying not to ooze snot all over it. Her head feels like it’s been stuffed full of all the used tissues currently crammed in her garbage bin. She’s praying for an early death.

“You caught Sawamura’s cold?” guesses Kenma. The soothing sounds of combat echo tinnily in the background.

“I caught Sawamura’s cold,” Kuroo confirms mournfully. “Don’t come near me, Kenma. Your constitution’s not strong enough. The team needs you right now.”

“I wasn’t going to come near you,” says Kenma. A crescendo in the _Dark Souls_ soundtrack indicates that Kenma has cleared another boss fight, and Kuroo frowns, levering herself up out of the blissful embrace of her pillow.

“Hey, young lady, isn’t it a school night? Should you be in bed?”

“I was just about to go to bed when you called.”

“Liar. Go to bed. The Centipede Demon will still be there for you in the morning.”

***

“It’s crazy how many people here Sawamura knows already,” Bokuto says around a mouthful of gyoza when she and Kuroo are out one evening with a couple of Bokuto’s Fukurodani yearmates. “People come up to talk to her all the time when we’re at the gym! Lots of girls, too. She even told me she went on a date last week!”

“Isn’t that nice for her,” says Kuroo, glowering down at her beer. She’s on her second, which means she’s almost at the point of convincing herself she doesn’t mind the taste too much. Technically all the girls at their table are still underage by at least a year, but if they dress right they can make themselves look a little older, and this izakaya is far enough from campus that the staff never card. Kuroo is always responsible about it, though—she never has more than two beers, which is practically nothing, given her exceptional alcohol tolerance.

“Yeah, with this girl from her political science class,” says Bokuto, oblivious to Kuroo’s poor temper, or else just choosing to ignore it. “She said she was so nervous she ended up doing, like, fifty push-ups before she went to meet her.”

That’s not cute. That’s not cute at all. Nope. Also, the image of Sawamura doing push-ups, her big arms straining, her body held in a perfect plank, her core rock-solid? That does nothing for Kuroo. _Nothing_. Her mind is elsewhere. She’s barely even paying attention. She’s more interested in the heated argument about pickled turnips going on between Konoha and Komi beside her. What did Sawamura wear on her date? Does she even own anything other than athletic clothes? Actually, here’s the thing—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. Kuroo’s not thinking about that. She really doesn’t care. Maybe Sawamura has a special date hoodie. Or a dressy pair of track pants. Who cares? Not Kuroo. Does Sawamura know jeans exist? Has anyone told her? Someone should tell her. Not Kuroo, obviously, given her total lack of interest in the whole situation.

“And will Sawamura be seeing her new friend again?” asks Kuroo, purely for the sake of making polite conversation, and not because it matters to her one way or the other in the slightest.

“Dunno, she didn’t say,” says Bokuto, chewing thoughtfully. “It’s funny though, Sawamura said they really hit it off talking about baseball. Did you know Sawamura’s into baseball? I didn’t know that… hey, you okay? Something go down the wrong way?” She thumps Kuroo on the back hard enough to make Kuroo’s spine creak, then thumps her again, until Kuroo forces herself to stop choking on her beer for the sole purpose of protecting her skeletal integrity.

Baseball. Baseball? But—but does Sawamura mean baseball, or, or… _baseball?_ Someone has to have told her by now, right? Some nice girl has to have sat her down and explained kindly that baseball talk is not some kind of lesbian love language, that Sawamura’s friend is a complete jackass who was playing a dumb trick on her. Sawamura is _not_ going around picking up girls by talking about pitching mechanics and comparing the stats of famous centre-fielders. Or is she? If anyone could do it—but no. No. She’s just trying to mess with Kuroo now. Right? She has to be.

Kuroo walks to the train station later, completely and utterly sober, with Bokuto still chattering away at her side. Tokyo’s pretty safe at night, especially around here, but Kuroo’s dad prefers to have Bokuto sleep over when they’re out late so that neither of them has to go home alone in the dark. The second they’re on the train, Bokuto passes out on Kuroo’s shoulder; she doesn’t drink at all, but going at life at one-hundred-and-twenty percent all day every day really takes it out of a girl. This leaves Kuroo (completely and utterly sober) to stare at the personal injury lawyer ad on the opposite wall of the train, the harsh fluorescent lighting washing out the ad’s already-faded colours, while she fixates on trying to envision what kind of breathable and sweat-wicking getup Sawamura dons for seducing her hordes of adoring admirers with obscure baseball trivia. Kuroo’s _dying_ of curiosity. She _has_ to know.

As the train rattles around a curve in the tracks and Bokuto slumps into her lap, an idea occurs to Kuroo, a brilliant idea, an idea worthy of having an annual award for innovation established in its name. Kuroo, who is _completely_ and _utterly_ sober, takes out her phone. She texts Yaku.

 **Kuroo:** hey demon senpai do you have suga-chan’s number by any chance?

 **Yaku:** Excuse me?

 **Kuroo:** like her phone number

 **Kuroo:** like the number. for her phone.

 **Yaku:** Why do you want Suga’s number?

 **Kuroo:** need to ask her if sawamura owns any clothes that aren’t made of high-performance nylon. extremely urgent.

 **Yaku:** Why don’t you just ask me yourself?

Kuroo squints at her phone, attempting to parse Yaku’s bizarre and frankly incoherent response. For reasons completely unrelated to Kuroo’s three-and-a-bit beers (because she is, as previously stated, _exceptionally_ sober right now), her screen seems ever so slightly blurry. She squints harder, holding her phone on an angle to see if that helps at all, which unfortunately it does. Realization dawns. Oh no. Oh God. She has not been texting Yaku. She has been texting Sawamura. The consistent punctuation should have been a dead giveaway.

While Kuroo is staring numbly at the ad for the personal injury lawyer, wondering if he takes on clients suffering from the immense self-inflicted emotional damage of sending embarrassing texts to the wrong person, another text comes in from Sawamura. It’s a photo. Kuroo opens it warily.

She doesn’t know what she’s expecting—Sawamura’s disapproving scowl, maybe, so that Sawamura can be sure Kuroo receives the full brunt of her ire, or maybe some kind of supercilious meme, although Kuroo’s confidence in Sawamura’s meme literacy is admittedly not very high. But the photo is neither of those things. It is a selfie taken in Sawamura’s bathroom mirror; Sawamura’s frown of concentration suggests she doesn’t do this very often. She’s wearing (Kuroo swallows, her throat suddenly dry) the plainest, most practical, most durable button-up Kuroo has ever seen, dark greyish-blue, white buttons, no pattern, some kind of denim blend or something. The buttons are done up (Kuroo’s palms start to sweat, her fingers sticking to the screen of her phone) _all the way to the top_. The collar sits snug around her neck; the shirt hugs her broad shoulders; whatever she’s wearing underneath flattens down her chest. But that’s not all. No. There are also the cuffs. Kuroo has never previously considered the matter of the cuffs—the cuffs, which are pulled down (Kuroo shifts in her seat, squeezing her thighs together) _all the way to the wrists_. Sawamura is so, so, so—what’s the word—so—hmm, yes—so… _fully clothed_.

Kuroo sets her phone face-down on Bokuto’s muscular back as Bokuto snores in her lap. She takes a moment to compose herself. A couple of deep breaths; a minute or two reciting the least exciting mathematical formulas she can think of in her head. She’s stronger than Sawamura’s hot young dad vibes. She can prove it.

 **Kuroo:** oh I’m swooning, sawamura

 **Kuroo:** is this your extra handsome date night look?

 **Kuroo:** I was picturing a special hoodie?

 **Sawamura:** Yeah, Asahi says I’m not allowed to wear that anymore.

Kuroo snorts. Then, because she is, after all, only human, she saves the photo to her phone and texts it to Yaku.

 **Kuroo:** <image>

 **Kuroo:** look at what sawamura sent me. look at it. look at it. yaku. look at it with your eyes.

 **Sawamura:** You’re still texting me.

 **Kuroo:** ah yes

***

Kuroo awakens as she usually does, disoriented and half-suffocated from having her pillow wrapped around her face. Her throat is parched, her head is throbbing gently, and her stomach is twisting itself up in loops of mild nausea, reminding her why two beers is meant to be a hard limit. She’s felt worse, but she’s definitely also felt better. 

She pushes herself upright, looks around her room blearily, and lets out an ungodly shriek. No one— _no one,_ not even Daishou—should ever have to wake up to the sight of Sawamura in her running gear looming over them, her beefy arms crossed disapprovingly, her frown threatening to evolve into a full-blown glower at any second. Kuroo flinches, and then attempts to mask her fear by scowling right back. “What are you doing in my room?” she demands.

“I let her in,” says Kenma, who is sitting at the foot of the bed in her pajamas, her legs tucked up under her as she jabs the buttons on her controller.

Kuroo squints at her. “Why did you let Sawamura into my room?”

“This is my room,” says Kenma. On the TV screen in front of her, one final well-placed hit from her Chosen Undead prompts the scythe-wielding Skeleton Lord to explode into a horde of smaller skeletons. Kenma has considerately turned the volume down to an ambient hum.

“Oh,” says Kuroo. “Then what am _I_ doing in your room?”

“You came in at one in the morning, woke up me and my parents, said _don’t let Sawamura know I’m here_ , and then fell asleep in my bed,” says Kenma. “Then Sawamura-san texted me this morning when you didn’t show up for your running date. It’s almost nine.”

Ah. Yes. It’s all coming back. Her three-and-a-bit beers. The hormonal whirlwind of receiving Sawamura’s selfie. A few minor text slip-ups. And then, for some reason, Sawamura had asked if she was drunk (which of course she wasn’t), and then Kuroo’s stupid not-drunk brain had had the brilliant idea to text Sawamura _I’m not drunk, I’m not drunk at all, in fact let’s run tomorrow morning so I can prove to you how completely not drunk and amazing I feel_ , and then Kuroo had dragged a groggy Bokuto off the train and been smacked in the face by the cold, hard reality of what she’d just signed herself up for. Evasive action had been taken. There were certain advantages to having a best friend who lived right down the street.

“Traitor,” says Kuroo, lobbing her pillow at Kenma, who dodges it easily.

“Uh huh. I texted your dad, by the way, so you’re welcome. Anyway…” Kenma glances at Sawamura, who looks deeply unimpressed.

“Well, are you ready?” demands Sawamura.

“Do I _look_ ready, Sawamura?” says Kuroo, yanking the covers back up over herself. “I’m unwell. I’m coming down with something. Go torture someone who can defend themselves—”

“You’re hungover. Come on, get up. I came all the way out here,” Sawamura says mercilessly, yanking the covers back down. Then her eyes widen in surprise. “Uh—”

Beside Kuroo, the mattress dips, and Bokuto sits up with a yawn, stretching her arms over her head until her shoulders pop. She blinks at Sawamura sleepily and reaches over to shake Kuroo, who scowls and swats her hand away. “Dude, Sawamura’s here,” Bokuto says, as if Kuroo could possibly have missed this. “Hey, are you guys running? Oh man, can I come?”

“Did—did you guys all sleep in one bed? All three of you?” asks Sawamura. She squints at the bed, then squints at the three of them, obviously trying to make the math work.

Kuroo leers at her instinctively. “Jealous, Sawamura?” she asks, and Sawamura goes pink.

“Yeah, dude, it’s like Tetris,” Bokuto tells Sawamura. She crawls over Kuroo, kneeing her right in the kidneys, and starts digging through her bag. “Gimme a sec to get changed, and then I’m ready, okay?”

“Did you want to come too, Kenma?” Sawamura asks politely, but Kenma just laughs.

So Kuroo, who now cannot back down without the bitter shame of losing to both Sawamura and Bokuto, has the inordinate pleasure of jogging hungover with the two most sadistic runners on the planet. Sawamura and Bokuto together seem to set a faster pace than Sawamura and Bokuto individually, each egging the other on. That’s not the worst part, though. No. The worst part, the most _disgusting_ part, is that Sawamura and Bokuto manage to keep their masochistic pace _while_ _maintaining a conversation_. Occasionally one of them will direct a question Kuroo’s way, and Kuroo will be forced to wheeze out a semi-coherent response while she concentrates her attention on not throwing up.

“Exercise is supposed to be a great hangover cure,” Sawamura says after, when Kuroo’s body gets the better of her, forcing her to excuse herself from their cool-down laps to puke discreetly in the bushes. Bokuto nods knowingly beside her. “You’d probably be feeling a lot worse right now if you’d just stayed in bed.”

Kuroo flips off the pair of them. She can’t manage anything more; she needs to retreat to lick her wounds. This morning has been a victory for Sawamura on all fronts. She’s a sadist. She’s a monster. She’s a tyrant. Kuroo can’t withstand her, not in her current frail condition. Sawamura does crouch beside Kuroo in the grass, though, rubbing Kurooo’s back while she throws up. For the sake of her own dignity, Kuroo’s willing to accept Sawamura’s fingers kneading into her trapezius as a consolation prize.

***

Kuroo narrows her eyes at Sawamura. Sawamura stares right back. Around them, the room descends into a cacophony of chairs squeaking on the floor and students variously bemoaning or lauding their grades as the rest of the class departs, but for the moment Kuroo’s world has narrowed to just her and Sawamura, sizing each other up, their hands gripping their newly returned quizzes, which are sitting facedown on the desk in front of them.

“Ready?” says Sawamura.

“On three,” says Kuroo. “One—two—”

They both flip their papers over just a millisecond before Kuroo says _three_. Kuroo’s eyes go to her own quiz first, to the ninety-three percent scrawled in the top right corner. Ha! Not bad, not bad at all, considering she barely studied. Math and science have always come easily to her. Ninety-three—she could probably have done better, but she’ll take a ninety-three.

Then her eyes go to Sawamura’s paper—first to Sawamura’s paper, then to Sawamura’s smug face, then back to Sawamura’s paper and its _ninety-four percent_. Ninety-four! Ninety- _four!_ Sawamura beat her by _one measly percent!_ Kuroo sees red. This is—this is intolerable. This is unacceptable. This is _excruciating_. One percent— _one percent—_

“I barely studied,” Kuroo mutters, scowling.

Sawamura’s face goes blank for a second. Then she smirks and says, “Oh, you studied? That’s cute.”

Kuroo spends the rest of the day stewing in a heady blend of blind rage and intense arousal. Periodically, she takes out her phone to look at the picture of Sawamura in her plain button-up shirt, for motivation.

“Fried rice again?” her dad asks wearily, when he pokes his head into the kitchen that evening.

“Fried rice again,” Kuroo confirms, and cracks an egg so hard it explodes all over the stove.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have never in my life taken a stats class, played _Dark Souls_ , or used a dating app so I'm doing my best out here
> 
> if you aren't familiar with the term (I wasn't and discovered it while doing research into wlw dating in Japan), _tachi_ literally refers to a type of Japanese sword but is used as a slang term similar to "top" in english and is apparently pretty commonly used in wlw dating profiles (but obviously not universal). my complete lack of experience in a) Japanese wlw dating culture and b) using dating apps and c) speaking any Japanese at all beyond _kage no bunshin jutsu_ (thanks _Naruto_ ) hindered my research a bit here but an effort was made. I also had a ton of trouble figuring out the most comment wlw dating apps/services in Japan - I read that HER was one of them but couldn't find much info. would love to hear from you if you know more about this than me!


	2. Chapter 2

On Tuesday evening, one of Kuroo’s coworkers from the café asks her out on a date. She turns him down graciously, then uses her break to call Kenma and moan about how awkward their shifts together are going to be from now on. On Wednesday morning, Kuroo puts on her sexiest cardigan and goes to the Todai General Library, where she knows Sawamura usually studies for an hour or two after her early class. She’s not going to brag about getting asked out by her coworker, because that would be vulgar. However, she is going to hang around Sawamura and drop pointed hints indicative of the fact that she has been deemed attractive and in-demand by a process of rigorous peer review, just so Sawamura understands she’s not the _only_ former high school volleyball captain capable of getting a date around here. Sawamura has been coasting along on an unacceptable winning streak lately. Kuroo needs to put her in her place.

To be clear, romance isn’t a competition. Kuroo knows that. But just in case Sawamura thinks romance _is_ a competition, Kuroo wants to make it very clear that romance is a competition _she’s_ winning.

She finds Sawamura in her usual spot on the library’s second floor. Kuroo slides into the empty seat beside her, props her elbow up on the desk, arranges her gangly frame into a contrivedly casual slouch, and says, “Fancy seeing you here, Sawamura.”

“Hey,” says Sawamura. She appears to have given the stick habitually lodged up her ass the day off, letting herself slump over the table, her chin resting on her forearm as she ignores her open notebook in favour of scrolling through her phone.

“What’s the matter? Tired out from entertaining all your admirers?” Kuroo asks.

“Yep,” says Sawamura. The brim of her baseball cap hides her face. She sets her phone down, but not before Kuroo catches a glimpse of the screen, where Sawamura is flipping through photos of Sugawara and Azumane. On a hunch, Kuroo leans in close, obnoxiously close, resting her cheek on the table and getting right up in Sawamura’s face before Sawamura manages to turn away. Her eyes are all red and puffy, like she’s been crying.

“Homesick?” Kuroo guesses. Golden Week is right behind them; Sawamura is only just back from her trip back home to Miyagi. She’s seemed pretty happy since she moved to Tokyo in the spring, but visiting her friends back home must make it harder to ignore what she’s missing.

“Nope,” says Sawamura. She reaches over, plants her whole hand over Kuroo’s face, and shoves her away.

“Would you like me to hold you in a tender embrace until you feel better?” Kuroo asks through Sawamura’s fingers, undeterred.

“Go away,” says Sawamura.

“Summer vacation’s coming up,” Kuroo points out. “You’re going home again, right?”

“Yeah,” Sawamura says gloomily. She sighs. “It’s just, Asahi was interviewing for a job in Tokyo… I guess I kind of got my hopes up.”

“She didn’t get it?”

“Nah.”

“Sorry. That sucks.” Kuroo slides a little closer, in case Sawamura is maybe reconsidering that tender embrace, but Sawamura stays put, and doesn’t seem particularly inclined to continue the conversation, either. Kuroo glances out the window, where the sky is a brilliant blue and the sun is blinding. They’ve had a cold spring, but it’s finally starting to feel like summer.

“Want to play a three-on-three tonight?” Kuroo suggests, and Sawamura’s whole face lights up. They haven’t had a chance to play together since Sawamura moved to Tokyo for school; Kuroo plays with an adult rec team in her neighbourhood, while Sawamura’s part of one of Todai’s volleyball circles, although she always complains that the girls spend more time drinking than playing.

They meet at the park in Kuroo and Kenma’s neighbourhood that evening, when Kenma and Akaashi are finished their respective after-school practices and Bokuto is done with the Todai team; Bokuto ropes Konoha in as their sixth, refusing to let her waste another nice evening buried in her textbooks. Kuroo and Kenma show up late, largely because Kuroo underestimates the amount of wheedling, pleading, and outright grovelling required to tear Kenma away from her beloved PS3. By the time they show up, the other four girls are already in the middle of a two-on-two, which gives Kuroo ample opportunity to stand beside the court and admire Sawamura’s form with a detached and analytical eye.

“You’re drooling,” says Kenma.

Kuroo hastily wipes her hand over her mouth, finds it totally dry, and glares at Kenma.

“Spiritually, you’re drooling,” Kenma clarifies. She heaves a sigh, watching with obvious dismay as Sawamura and the Fukurodani girls race around on either side of the net. “I don’t want to move too much, okay? I’m tired from practice. I’ll just stand by the net and put up whatever balls you and Sawamura can get me.”

“Fine, fine. Hey, thanks for coming out with us,” says Kuroo, tugging on Kenma’s ponytail until Kenma bats her hand away. “Seriously. I owe you.”

“Repay me by asking Sawamura out already so I don’t have to deal with your weird pining anymore,” says Kenma.

“Never. If I ask her out, she wins. But don’t worry, I’ve been wearing my best cardigans to run a prolonged campaign of seduction. Eventually her gay little jock brain is going to crack under the pressure and then she’ll be _begging_ me to date her. I’m playing the long game,” Kuroo explains.

On the square of dirt that serves as a court, Sawamura throws herself after one of Bokuto’s spikes, grinding dirt into her t-shirt as she hits the ground. She’s back on her feet in seconds, already starting the approach for her spike as Konoha sets for her. She’s wearing a pair of baggy athletic shorts and an old pair of kneepads on top of her leggings. Why? The extra layer is so unnecessary. It’s not even that cold out. Why does Sawamura insist on doing this? Why must she always dress like an uppity mid-thirties personal trainer who spaced out during her boss’s dress code talk and is too embarrassed to ask about it now? More importantly, why must the sight of Sawamura flaunting little to no bare skin always make Kuroo feel an intense need to take an ice-cold bath?

Kenma gives Kuroo the kind of long, slow look Kuroo loathes most, the kind of look indicating in no uncertain terms that Kenma is currently doing the psychological equivalent of peeling Kuroo like a banana. “People find Sawamura a little intimidating sometimes, don’t they?” says Kenma. “Shouyou says she did.”

“Oh, I’m sure _some_ people do,” says Kuroo. “Not me, obviously. But _some_ people, sure.”

“You’re scared of her, aren’t you?” says Kenma.

“Terrified,” Kuroo admits. “I have this recurring nightmare where I’m eating her out and she just frowns at me and tells me I’m doing it wrong…”

“I’m not surprised, but I also wish I didn’t know that about you,” says Kenma, grimacing.

***

The first time Sawamura digs up a perfect A-pass for Kenma to set to Kuroo so that Kuroo can slam the ball down right over Akaashi’s head, it occurs to Kuroo that she and Sawamura have never actually played together on the same side of the net before. Kuroo is intimately familiar with Sawamura’s intensity; being able to harness that intensity for her own devious purposes is thrillingly novel.

“You guys are so _annoying!_ ” Bokuto growls, spiking the ball wildly out of bounds as Kuroo jumps to block her. Sawamura is short and her attacks are competent but nothing special, but between her and Kuroo, their three-person team is infuriatingly consistent about getting the Fukurdani girls’ spikes back up in the air.

“Bokuto-san, calm down,” Akaashi says sharply. Konoha just shakes her head.

“I know, I know,” Bokuto says, sounding sulky. Akaashi hasn’t broken her habit of analytically monitoring Bokuto’s emotional vitals, but Kuroo also knows how hard Bokuto’s been working to get better at handling her mood swings. The Todai volleyball club is competitive. They don’t have space on the court for a glass canon. Of course, this doesn’t stop Kuroo from sticking her tongue out at Bokuto while Sawamura jogs off to grab the ball, earning her a nasty scowl from Bokuto in return.

“Nice block. Let’s finish ‘em,” Sawamura tells Kuroo when she gets back, spinning the ball between the tips of her fingers. Her Tohoku accent is barely noticeable most of the time, but it comes through a little when she gets fired up. She tucks the ball under one arm and raises her hand for a high-five, grinning a grin that’s all teeth.

The smack of their palms connecting reverberates all the way through Kuroo’s body, sitting heavy in the pit of her stomach, cycloning around in her brain, slicing through her heart like a meat cleaver gliding through jelly. Kuroo watches Sawamura walk to the back of the court to serve and thinks, through a rising fog of panic, _oh fuck_ , _oh fuck, oh FUCK._

***

“But haven’t you _always_ wanted to kiss Sawamura? You definitely wanted to kiss her in high school,” says Yaku. She scrapes her spoon across the bottom of her bowl, trying to dredge up a few last traces of her kakigori, and shifts her legs under their café table until the spongy soles of her sandals kick against Kuroo’s ankles. Summer vacation has brought Yaku and Kai back from Kyoto and returned Sawamura to Miyagi, which is frankly just as well, given Kuroo’s current inability to look at Sawamura without breaking out in a nervous sweat.

“That was different,” says Kuroo, shaking her head. “In high school I wanted to kiss her _as rivals_. Now I want to kiss her because I’m in love with her.”

“So what, you’re suddenly not rivals anymore?” says Yaku. She gives up on her empty bowl and starts eyeing Kai’s instead, until Kai generously nudges it between them so they can share.

“No, we’re obviously still rivals,” says Kuroo.

“So… you’re in love with her… as rivals?” asks Kai.

“Exactly. You get it. See, Yaku? Kai gets it.”

“Wait, wait. Can we go back to the part where Sawamura high-fived you and you fell madly in love with her?” says Yaku.

“Yes?” says Kuroo.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Must have been one hell of a high-five.”

“It was,” Kuroo says dreamily. Her own kakigori drips off her spoon and spatters on her lap, entirely forgotten. “Our palms aligned perfectly…”

“Oh, that’s nice,” says Kai. Yaku just shakes her head.

***

“Ninety-five,” Sawamura says smugly, holding up her quiz for substantiation. Even though it’s August, she’s wearing a sweater to stave off the chill of the overly air-conditioned lecture hall, a sweater zipped all the way up to her neck. That full zip Does Things to Kuroo. The way Sawamura’s sitting with her legs sprawled open in her seat, a couple inches of bare thigh showing between her knees and the hem of her shorts, isn’t exactly helping either.

“Ninety-five?” says Kuroo. She slips a thumb under the corner of her own paper and tilts it up ever so slightly, squeezing one eye shut instinctively as she braces to peek at her own grade.

“Ninety-five,” Sawamura confirms.

“Ninety-five, huh?” says Kuroo, fighting back a grin.

“Stop saying _ninety-five_ like that and just tell me what you got already,” Sawamura snaps.

Kuroo flips over her quiz and shoves it in Sawamura’s face, and Sawamura’s smugness dissolves into dismay. She might have taken the lead in the spring quarter, but that was exactly the wake-up call Kuroo needed to start getting serious in the summer quarter. Kuroo studied for _two whole hours_ for this quiz. She even did _extra practice questions_ instead of just skimming over her formulas like usual.

“Well, don’t be embarrassed, Sawamura,” Kuroo says. She offers her a magnanimous smile even as she waves the paper even closer to Sawamura’s face to show off her ninety-seven percent, Sawamura jerking her head away like a toddler stubbornly refusing to try her vegetables. “There’s still time to catch up. If you ask me _really nicely_ , I might even be willing to help you study.”

Sawamura packs up her books in a huff, glowering at her pencils as if each has done her a grievous personal wrong. Kuroo taunts her a little more about her grade out of principle, but her mind is elsewhere, namely on her decision to—yes, her decision to finally ask Sawamura out. She still stands by what she told Kenma at the park, but on the other hand, she can’t deny that Sawamura’s gay little jock brain is proving unexpectedly resistant to the magnetism of Kuroo’s best cardigans—besides which, it turns out that the agonizing uncertainty of having a serious crush is actually _more_ painful than admitting defeat to Sawamura. Who could have guessed? Anyway, the more Kuroo thinks about it—and Kuroo has thought about it a _lot_ over the past few weeks—the more Kuroo realizes that if she asks Sawamura out before Sawamura asks _her_ out, she is still, in a way, winning, proving her superiority in the sort of aggressive cold war that is true love.

Kuroo has been going over her lines in her head all weekend, revising them into perfection. She needs to be smooth, because of course she needs to be smooth, but she also needs to be direct, because this is Sawamura, after all. She needs to bare her heart, but only a little bit, because if she bares it too much then Sawamura will be able to wrench open her ribcage and squash her heart into a pulp with one big, callused hand. Thus, she has settled on three sentences: simple, subdued, straightforward. Sentence One, the Preface: _Hey, Sawamura, Nekoma has their first qualifier game for spring nationals this weekend_. Sentence Two, the Proposal: _So what do you say, want to come watch it with me?_ Sentence Three, the Informational Appendix: _To be clear, Sawamura, this is date_.

Kuroo slings her bag over one shoulder and follows Sawamura out of the lecture hall with the last of the class’s stragglers. She settles her face into a smile, even though Kenma has advised against this on the basis that Kuroo’s version of a smile is likely to piss Sawamura off. Kuroo tucks her hands behind her back to hide the fact that they’re trembling a little, and takes a deep breath.

“Hey, Sawamura,” she says, and Sawamura glances up at her, still sour-faced over Kuroo’s ninety-seven percent. “Nekoma has their first qualifier game for spring nationals this weekend.”

“Oh yeah?” says Sawamura. Her resentment is already fading. Volleyball talk dopes her up like catnip.

“So what do you say, want to come watch it with me?” asks Kuroo. Okay, this is good, she’s doing well. She’s already two-thirds of the way there.

“Yeah, that would be awesome!” says Sawamura. She grins, and the subsequent rush of adrenaline Kuroo experiences shorts her brain right out.

“Okay!” says Kuroo. “Okay. Okay! Ooo- _kay_. That’s great. Very cool. See you then.” For unknown reasons, her body decides this is a good opportunity to pat Sawamura on the head. She leaves while Sawamura is still staring at her in astonishment, before she has a chance to embarrass herself further.

Kuroo gallantly meets Sawamura at her apartment on Saturday so they can go to the arena together. She wears her shortest skirt, the one that always makes Yaku glare at her and snap, “We _get it_ , you have _legs_ , you giraffe-looking _freak_.” She also wears her nicest underwear, just in case. Having put several hours of analytical evaluation into her outfit, she is just a tiny bit disappointed to see that Sawamura looks much the same as she always does, like this outing is just another inconvenient detour on her way to the gym. Maybe she reserves her rumoured nice clothes for second dates only. _However_ —Kuroo _is_ gratified to note the way Sawamura’s linger over her a little longer than usual as they walk down the sidewalk together.

“You’re staring, Sawamura,” says Kuroo, smirking at her, and Sawamura’s face goes pink.

“I’ve never seen you in a skirt before,” she mutters, suddenly very intent on digging through her bag for her SUICA pass as they approach the train station.

“No? Well, I used to wear one every day for school,” Kuroo points out.

“Yeah, me too,” Sawamura says bitterly. Then she grins and adds, “Did you guys ever play that game where you held stuff between your thighs and tried to sneak it into class? Like a piece of fruit or something? Suga managed a whole melon once, but then it rolled right off her chair in the middle of the lesson when she stood up to answer a question.”

Kuroo snorts. She’s heard enough of Sawamura’s stories about her high school friends to know that Karasuno’s sweet ex-vice-captain is nowhere near as innocent as she looks. “I always knew you were a troublemaker,” says Kuroo, elbowing Sawamura in the ribs.

Sawamura shoves her back and waves a hand dismissively. “Yeah, well, _I_ was never any good at it. It made me too nervous—I’d always tense up and crush whatever I was trying to hold.”

Holy shit. That’s so hot. What the hell? That’s so—how is Kuroo supposed to—what the—okay, so Sawamura really thought she could just drop that bombshell like it was nothing, like there was some universe in which learning that Sawamura used to _habitually_ and _unintentionally_ crush fruit between her thighs _wouldn’t_ send Kuroo’s blood pressure skyrocketing?

Kuroo smiles uneasily and makes a surreptitious effort to wipe her suddenly sweaty palms on her skirt. She knows it’s only their first date, but screw it, she’s going to make a move. She’ll need some time to work up to it, of course, but before the day is over, she’s going to hold Sawamura’s _stupid hand_ or _die trying_.

***

“You’re never going to believe this, Kenma,” Kuroo says glumly, trudging into Kenma’s room and throwing herself down on the floor beside her, where Kenma is hunched over in her usual gaming position. “Guess what happened when I was watching your match with Sawamura today? Great job, by the way. You guys crushed it. But go on, guess.”

Kenma doesn’t do anything crazy like pause her game, but her eyes do flicker sideways to Kuroo’s face for a second before she focuses back on the screen. Having played out all of her favourite classes in _Dark Souls_ and taken a brief intermission to try out a couple of new dating sims, she has now moved on to terrorizing the various demonic entities and evildoers of _Dark Souls II_.

“Okay, I’m going to guess that you tried to hold Sawamura Daichi’s hand at our game today, and she fist-bumped you instead,” Kenma says. When Kuroo gapes at her, Kenma shrugs and explains, “I saw you from the court. It was embarrassing to watch.”

Kuroo puts her head in her hands and groans. “I don’t know what I did wrong! I thought things were going well! Who fist-bumps someone on a date?”

“Did Sawamura know it was supposed to be a date?” Kenma asks. “She seems like the kind of person who needs that kind of thing spelled out for her.”

“I know _that_ ,” Kuroo snaps. She suspects anyone who has ever spoken to Sawamura for more than five minutes knows that. “Of course she knew it was a date! I came right out and—and—”

Kuroo replays her conversation with Sawamura from Monday in her head. She closes her eyes.

“Did you get overexcited and forget to tell her?” asks Kenma.

“Let’s talk about something else,” says Kuroo.

***

“D’you know why I took history as my major? Huh? D’you know why?” Bokuto mumbles into the floor of Sawamura’s apartment, on which she is currently lying face-down.

“Because you like history?” Sawamura guesses. She and Kuroo are sitting beside each other on Sawamura’s bed, their own textbooks open in front of them. Kuroo is highly aware of the scant few inches of space between their bare knees, especially whenever Sawamura shifts her weight, leaning in closer for just a second or two before she settles again. Kuroo is also highly aware of Bokuto completely unravelling on Sawamura’s floor. It’s kind of hard to miss.

“Because you thought it would be easy and all you really wanted to do was play on the Todai team?” guesses Kuroo, whose extensive friendship with Bokuto has allowed her the dubious advantage of insight into the unique inner workings of Bokuto’s mind.

Bokuto snaps her fingers and points in Kuroo’s general direction without bothering to raise her head off the floor. “Exactly. That’s it exactly. History totally should be easy, right? Like, it’s just a bunch of old stuff that already happened! But guess what? There’s so much of it! There’s so much history! And it just _keeps happening!_ It never stops! There’s always gonna be more history! It’s not _fair!_ ”

“That’s rough, Kou,” says Kuroo. She very carefully does not look at Sawamura, because she suspects that if she does, both of them will crack up.

“How long did you say your assignment has to be?” Sawamura asks.

“Two pages,” Bokuto mutters resentfully. “ _Two_ pages! Two _whole_ pages! What am I supposed to write about for _two whole pages?_ ”

“Well, what do the instructions for the assignment tell you to write about?”

“I dunno, I haven’t read them yet,” says Bokuto, and Sawamura looks physically pained. “ _Two pages_ , though, I mean…” Her phone buzzes, and with what appears to be a great effort, she drags it across the floor towards her and flops her head over sideways to check the notification. Then she lurches upright, all traces of academic ennui evaporating right before Kuroo’s eyes. “Oh my God, Akaashi’s neighbour’s cat had a whole bunch of kittens! I gotta go meet them! I’ll see you guys later, okay?”

“You know what I’ve always admired in Kou?” Kuroo asks, as Bokuto disappears out Sawamura’s door in a flurry of forgotten handouts and old protein bar wrappers.

“Her scholasticism?” says Sawamura.

Kuroo snickers and smacks Sawamura in the arm. Sawamura shoves her back, grinning. Kuroo shoves her harder. Sawamura braces her back against the wall and her feet against Kuroo’s butt and uses all the power of those melon-crushing thighs to heave Kuroo right off the bed, except that Kuroo twists around and grabs Sawamura’s legs and holds on tight, and then they’re wrestling in earnest, kicking and grabbing and twisting each other’s arms and grappling each other against the mattress, until they’re both breathing too hard to laugh anymore, until Kuroo’s whole body is thrumming with the thrill of having Sawamura’s hands all over her and Sawamura’s weight pressing down on her.

It’s not that Kuroo lets Sawamura win. No. Obviously not. That would be antithetical to Kuroo’s very existence. No, it’s more that somewhere in the middle, Kuroo’s goal shifts, such that winning can no longer be achieved by the simple expedient of grinding Sawamura’s face into the duvet or sending her sprawling onto the floor. So when Kuroo finds herself pinned, Sawamura sitting on her stomach and holding down her wrists above her head, Kuroo doesn’t try to buck her off. She goes still and stares up at her, and Sawamura stares back, her triumphant grin fading into something else.

“You’re _heavy_ ,” Kuroo complains. Her heart is going so fast she can hear the blood rushing in her head. Sawamura’s thighs squeeze against her bare skin where their wrestling has hiked her shirt up a bit. “What do you eat, rocks?”

“Cement, actually,” says Sawamura. Kuroo tries to tug her wrists free, but Sawamura just tightens her grip.

“You going to keep me here all day, or what?” Kuroo asks.

“Nah, I’ve got better things to do,” says Sawamura, but she makes no move to let her up.

“I bet I’m a better kisser than you,” says Kuroo. She’s not proud of herself. She knows even as the challenge rolls off her tongue that it’s childish, transparent, desperate. She says it anyway, and smirks up at Sawamura, taunting her.

“Bet you’re not,” says Sawamura.

“Prove it, then,” says Kuroo.

“Fine, I will,” says Sawamura, and she leans in and kisses her.

It only lasts a second, so fast Kuroo barely registers Sawamura’s mouth pressing against hers. But then Sawamura kisses her again, and then a third time and a fourth and a fifth until Kuroo loses count, each time a little longer, a little more confident, until they just stay pressed together, until Kuroo lets her lips part and feels Sawamura’s tongue sliding against hers, sending heat spiking dizzyingly all the way through her body, starting that familiar tingling between her legs, that slow heat coiling in the pit of her stomach. Sawamura’s fingers have gone slack against Kuroo’s wrists, so Kuroo tugs her hands free and wraps her arms around Sawamura’s back, pulling her in closer, clutching at her t-shirt, hoping Sawamura doesn’t notice the sudden clamminess of her palms.

“Not bad, Sawamura,” Kuroo mutters breathlessly against her mouth, trying to stay cool, trying to pretend her heart isn’t going like crazy, trying to pretend she wouldn’t trade her A+ in calculus to have Sawamura put her hands up Kuroo’s shirt right now.

“Want me to give you some tips?” Sawamura asks. With such eerily punctual precision that Kuroo feels a strong urge to double-check her grades in the Todai online portal just in case, Sawamura’s hands go to Kuroo’s stomach, slipping under the hem of her shirt, her fingertips warm against Kuroo’s bare skin.

She doesn’t try to move any higher, though. Kuroo’s going to lose her mind. She wants to say _just touch me, please just touch me_ , but it’s embarrassing when Sawamura’s face is so stern, so composed. Luckily, Kuroo’s brain has evolved a very specific chemical response to Sawamura that automatically converts all the nervous, neurotic jitteriness churned up by her amygdala into sly arrogance, protecting her emotionally squishy bits in the manner of a curled-up armadillo.

“Yeah, actually,” says Kuroo. “Let’s say you’ve got a girl who you think is really, _really_ hot under you, and you really want to feel her up, but you’re too shy to go for it—what would you recommend, Sawamura-sensei?”

“Hmm. Can’t say I’ve ever been in that situation before. I’m sure you’ll be able to figure it out, though,” Sawamura says—but her face is flushing red, and finally her fingers slide up higher, skimming over Kuroo’s ribs, pushing up under the elastic of her sports bra (Kuroo wishes she’d worn something nicer). Sawamura kisses her again, pressing her mouth to Kuroo’s cheek, to her jaw, to her neck. Her big hands cup Kuroo’s breasts and Kuroo’s stupid heart does its best to give her away, thumping away frantically in her ribcage, racing so fast Sawamura has to feel it.

Kuroo wonders if Sawamura’s actually into her, or if she just wants to mess around. She wonders if Sawamura’s wondering the same thing. There is a very easy way to resolve the uncertainty; this isn’t exactly quantum mechanics. Kuroo, being naturally inclined to idiocy, at least when Sawamura is involved, does not attempt to make use of it. Instead, she rolls her hips up, just to see what Sawamura will do, and Sawamura shifts against her, the muscles in her jaw clenching as she grinds down just a little bit, and Kuroo grins an artificially lazy grin and says, “Alright, Sawamura, what else have you got for me?”

***

Kenma’s mom glances up from her gardening and waves Kuroo into the Kozume house with a smile. “Try to get her to come out of her room for a bit, will you? It’s such a beautiful day,” she tells Kuroo, in the pained tone of someone who understands exactly how hard that request will be to fulfill.

“No promises, Kozume-san,” Kuroo calls as she steps through the door and slips off her shoes. She sniffles a little, and rubs her nose. She feels marginally better than she did an hour ago, but that’s not saying much.

Kenma is in the process of fighting her way through to the Smelter Demon’s boss room when Kuroo trudges into her bedroom and flops down on her bed. Kuroo buries her face in the duvet and breathes in the familiar scent of the Kozume family’s laundry detergent. “Doesn’t your back get sore from sitting hunched up on the floor like that?” Kuroo mumbles into the fabric.

“Sometimes, yeah,” says Kenma.

“It’s bad for your posture.”

“Mm.”

“I sort of had sex with Sawamura,” says Kuroo. Kenma’s head twitches as she glances over her shoulder at Kuroo behind her on the bed. In her moment of distraction, a Dragon Acolyte leaps out from around a corner and tries to smash in the head of her Bearer of the Curse with his hammer. Kenma’s shoulders hunch in annoyance as her health bar flashes.

“How was it?” Kenma asks, her fingers flying over the controller buttons.

“Really bad,” says Kuroo. “Really indescribably bad.”

“That sucks,” says Kenma, and magic-punches the Acolyte all the way down the creepy corridor.

(“I think it might feel better if you relax a little, Sawamura,” says Kuroo. Her hands are shaking. She feels like she might throw up, but sort of in a good way, but also sort of in a bad way.

“I _am_ relaxed!” snaps Sawamura, red across her face and all the way down her neck. She’s so tense Kuroo can feel her naked hip starting to bruise under Sawamura’s fingers.

“ _Are_ you? You keep wincing—”

“I’m not wincing!”

“You just did it again! This isn’t supposed to hurt! Should I stop? We can stop—”

“It’s fine! It doesn’t hurt!”

“ _Then why do you keep wincing?_ ”)

Kuroo traces the stitching along the edge of Kenma’s duvet with one finger, then picks at the break in the thread where years of use have worn it clean through. Eventually she shifts around until she can watch the screen as Kenma wreaks her wrath upon the the remaining Acolytes like some kind of vengeful min-maxed deity. Kuroo knows the Acolytes are evil or whatever, but still, watching Kenma tear them to shreds without mercy, she kind of pities them.

“When you say _indescribably bad_ …” Kenma says after a while.

Kuroo squeezes her eyes closed, wondering if she can will herself into a state of focalized episodic amnesia. “You know when you bought _Assassin’s Creed: Unity_ when it first came out, and you were really excited about it, but then it was so buggy you rage-quit and deleted your save file two hours in?”

Kenma shudders at the memory. Then she frowns. “Are you telling me you rage-quit sex with Sawamura?”

(“I’m going home,” says Kuroo, grabbing her shorts off the floor. Mortification and disappointment are churning up a little whirlpool of nausea in the pit of her stomach; she’s still kind of turned on, but she’s also really not. She can feel her eyes stinging.

“Okay, see you later,” says Sawamura, hunching her legs up against her chest, refusing to look at Kuroo.)

“Sort of,” Kuroo tells Kenma. “Except I feel like there’s a certain dignity to your rage-quitting, whereas I just went home and cried for forty minutes. You know how you swore you’d never play _ACU_ again? Well—”

Kenma sighs and says, “Kuro, remind me how many times you’ve had sex before?”

“Counting Sawamura?”

“Sure.”

Kuroo thinks about this for a moment. “Almost once,” she says.

“What would your stats professor say about your findings?”

“That they’re statistically insignificant based on a P-value greater than 0.05,” Kuroo admits reluctantly.

“There you go. Maybe try collecting a little more data before you decide to swear off sex for life,” says Kenma. She leans forward, scowling at her TV screen as a horde of Acolytes mobs her. “This combat system’s such a mismatch. Why would the devs make the gameplay so slow and then cram you in a tiny room with so many enemies so you pull them all at once? Why would they remove the i-frames when you enter fog gates and then stack ten knights around to guard? The 1v1s are okay, and I like the PvP, but the mobs are a slog…”

“You could play something else,” suggests Kuroo.

“Why? I’m having fun,” says Kenma. “Anyway, I’m sure it’ll be better next time.”

“Oh yeah? Are you going to respec your abilities?”

“I meant with Sawamura.”

“Oh.” Kuroo rolls over and lets her arm flop over her face. “Yeah, right. She’s never going to speak to me again. I’m dead to her. Kenma, I really messed up…”

“You were probably both stupid about it. Just text her.”

“I can’t…”

“Of course you can.”

“Kenmaaa…”

Kenma heaves another sigh. Blood spatters across the screen as she wipes out the last of the Acolytes and begins industriously looting their corpses. “I’m almost at the boss fight, and then there should be a save point. Let’s play _Mario Kart_ after.”

***

Sawamura doesn’t text her. Naturally, Kuroo handles this with grace and poise, if _grace_ involves watching _Japan’s Wildlife: The Untold Story_ five times in three days and _poise_ involves sniffling incoherently on the phone to Yaku while Yaku snaps, “Kuroo, what the heck, stop calling me in the middle of practice!”

Admittedly, as Kenma has pointed out several times, Kuroo hasn’t texted Sawamura either. She’s far too embarrassed. Kuroo has, however, taken out her phone to stare at Sawamura’s nice selfie about five million times, that modest, functional button-up now effectively seared into her retinas. Similarly, she has read and re-read and _re-_ re-read the last few messages they sent each other before attempting to hook up:

 **Sawamura:** I saw a pigeon that looked just like you at the train station today.

 **Kuroo:** oh? were you wildly aroused by it?

 **Sawamura:** Well… it was a pigeon.

 **Kuroo:** so yes?

 **Sawamura:** Obviously yes.

When that becomes too painful, Kuroo resorts to going through her old statistics quizzes instead. There’s the one where Sawamura beat her by one percent, the one where they tied, the one where Sawamura beat her by _half_ a percent, the one where they tied again, the one where she beat Sawamura by two percent, the one where she beat Sawamura by three percent, the one where they tied _again_ …

“Want to go to Yoyogi Park?” Bokuto asks her when she calls Kuroo on Saturday. “There’s this sweet tree I want to try climbing…”

“I’m actually pretty busy right now,” says Kuroo.

“Oh, okay,” says Bokuto. “Like, busy for real, or just eating chips in bed again?”

“Busy for real,” says Kuroo, brushing chip crumbs off her chest as she stares up at her bedroom ceiling.

“Hey, I saw Sawamura yesterday,” says Bokuto, in the overly innocent tone of someone not nearly as sneaky as she thinks she is. “We got boba after the gym. She ordered this one with lychee jelly? It was pretty good. She let me share it with her when I dumped mine in my backpack by accident.”

“How nice for you,” says Kuroo. Sharing boba with Sawamura… that _is_ nice… last time she and Sawamura got boba, Kuroo had grabbed Sawamura’s and sucked up as many bubbles as she could before Sawamura managed to wrestle it back from her, and then Sawamura had put her in a headlock… it had been so cute…

“She told me her friend Azumane’s moving here for a new job in a couple weeks. She’s pretty pumped about it. But, y’know, she still seemed kind of bummed out for some reason… not sure why… no idea… so weird…”

Kuroo hesitates. She chews on her lower lip. “How bummed out?” she asks.

“ _Super_ bummed out,” Bokuto insists, with unwarranted enthusiasm. “She didn’t even want to up the weight on her leg presses!”

Wow. For Sawamura, that’s serious. Maybe Kenma’s right, maybe Kuroo _should_ text her… but what is she supposed to say? _Sorry we had terrible sex, please date me anyway, by the way I think you still have my underwear, just ignore the big hole in the crotch, it was laundry day and I wasn’t planning on having terrible sex with you, sincerely, your close friend and sworn rival Kuroo Tetsurou?_ That’s an option, for sure, but it has to be said that it leaves a little to be desired in terms of sophistication…

On Sunday, Kuroo is over at Kenma’s house helping Kenma with her chemistry homework when she glances out the window and sees a familiarly jockish figure walking down the street, her bag slung over one shoulder, her hands jammed in her pockets, her baseball cap shadowing her face. Kuroo responds in a calm and collected manner by rolling off Kenma’s bed and crouching on the floor like some kind of neurotic prey animal, just in case Sawamura has suddenly gained the power to see into second-story windows from halfway down the block. Kenma, who is braver, just goes to the window to observe.

“What’s she doing?” Kuroo hisses. “Is she going to my house?”

“I think so, yeah…” says Kenma. “Oh, your dad’s come out… she’s talking to him…”

“What’s he saying?”

“Sorry, I forgot to put on subtitles—”

“Don’t be glib with me, young lady. This is serious. What’s she doing now?”

“She’s walking over here…”

Kuroo grabs Kenma’s shirt and tugs her down before Sawamura can catch a glimpse of her. “Kenma—”

“I’m not covering for you,” Kenma says flatly. “Stop being such a baby.”

“Please? Just this once? _Please?_ I’m not ready. I need time to prepare—”

“You’ve had _days_ already. Just talk to her and get it over with.”

“Kenma.” Kuroo closes her eyes. She has learned, over the years, how best to frame her personal problems in ways that Kenma can understand. “If I don’t take some time to buff my resistance, Sawamura’s massive psychic damage blast will one-shot me. Seriously.”

“Oh, _fine_ ,” says Kenma, heaving a belaboured sigh. She shakes Kuroo off her and gets back to her feet. “I’ll tell her you’re not here.”

“Hey, if you’re going downstairs anyway, can you get me a Fanta on your way back up—? Or, you know what, never mind, I can get it myself,” Kuroo says quickly, when Kenma glares at her.

While Kenma’s gone, Kuroo takes the opportunity to snoop through Kenma’s school notebooks in search of any incriminating doodles or maybe super-secret love notes from admirers tucked between the pages. She’s hoping to find something from Hinata, probably with a lot of badly drawn hearts, incorrectly spelled declarations of affection, and too many exclamation marks—but if such a love note exists, Kenma has taken care to hide it where her nosy best friend will need to put in a little more forensic effort to find it. Distantly, Kuroo hears the murmur of voices downstairs; she relaxes when the sound of the front door closing indicates Sawamura has been effectively dispatched. Then there are footsteps on the stairs, so Kuroo hurriedly crams Kenma’s books back into her school bag and throws herself down on the bed to promote the impression that all she’s been up to is some casual, non-intrusive lounging.

“Hey, Kenma—” she starts, and freezes.

What she expects is Kenma standing in the doorway. What she does not expect is Sawamura standing behind Kenma, her arms held stiffly at her sides, broadcasting discomfort like a high-wattage FM radio transmitter. She’s clutching her baseball cap in one hand, presumably having taken it off to be polite when she came inside. That’s so—who even does that these days? Kuroo stares at Sawamura. Sawamura stares at the ceiling. Kenma grabs her PS Vita off her desk, gives Kuroo a pointed look, and heads back down the stairs, leaving the two of them alone.

Sawamura clears her throat. Still staring at the ceiling, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a bunch of red cosmos, some of the petals slightly squashed. “I got you these,” she says, and holds them out in Kuroo’s general direction.

“Oh,” says Kuroo, and swallows. The girls in the volleyball club gave Kuroo flowers when she graduated, but this is different. “Why?”

Finally Sawamura looks at her, frowning. “Because—because I—well, because Suga told me to,” Sawamura admits. “Um. I should have texted you. Sorry. And sorry about—I just, I got nervous—”

“You got _nervous?_ You _did?_ I couldn’t tell,” Kuroo assures her, with a smugness entirely unbefitting someone who chose to cope with losing half her virginity by binge-watching nature documentaries. She takes the flowers. They’re nice, even the squashed ones. She does feel she should say something honest, since Sawamura came all the way out here and apologized when she really didn’t have to—but Kuroo also recognizes that talking about her feelings while looking Sawamura right in her intimidating face will cause instantaneous brain tissue necrosis, so Kuroo stares at the _Final Fantasy X_ poster on Kenma’s wall instead and informs Tidus, “Anyway, that was also the first time I’d—you know—so—”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Sawamura says quickly, and Kuroo finds herself sandwiched between relief and disappointment. Sawamura opens her bag again and pulls out Kuroo’s underwear, crisply folded. “I, uh, I also brought you this… I washed it…”

“Thank you,” says Kuroo, accepting the underwear with as much dignity as possible.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a hole right in the—”

“I’m aware. I was behind on my laundry,” Kuroo says stiffly.

“Right,” says Sawamura, who has probably never been behind on anything even once in her life. “So… are we good to stop awkwardly ignoring each other, or…?”

“Why, Sawamura, it almost sounds like you _missed_ me,” Kuroo says, grinning, and then ducks when Sawamura swings her bag at Kuroo’s head. “Okay, okay, we’re good. But can I offer you a piece of advice? As your friend and wise elder? You definitely need to jerk off more. It’s in everyone’s best interests—I can even write down some instructions for you—whoa, don’t hit me, I’m only trying to help—”

“I jerk off plenty, thanks,” says Sawamura, making another spirited effort to smother Kuroo with Kenma’s pillow. She’s as red as the cosmos that Kuroo’s now clutching too tight in one hand, but her mouth is also twitching like she’s trying to fight a smile.

“Oh, _sure._ Don’t be shy, Sawamura. I’m always happy to share my expertise,” says Kuroo, because certain habits are hard to break, and also because when it comes to Sawamura she is fundamentally a dumbass with all the learning potential of a particularly stupid hunk of oceanic basalt.

“Nice try. I’m not falling for that twice,” says Sawamura.

“Fair enough,” says Kuroo. She gets to her feet and stretches, then straightens Kenma’s duvet out of habit. “Can I at least invite you over to my place for dinner, since you came all the way out here?”

“Okay. Thanks,” says Sawamura, her face conveying the particular brand of excitement that only offers of food seem to stir in her. “Oh, but—I didn’t bring a gift for your dad or anything—”

“Don’t worry about it. He’s been bugging me to have you over for ages, so your presence will be the greatest gift of all. Isn’t that nice? I just hope you’re ready for me to make you a fried rice that will kick your fried rice’s ass,” says Kuroo. She steps out into the hall and heads for the stairs, only to realize that Sawamura has opted to stand in Kenma’s room staring at her like a department store dummy instead of following behind. “Well? Are you coming?”

“You’re cooking for me?” Sawamura asks. She has a funny look on her face.

“Well, yeah,” says Kuroo. How else is she supposed to prove her culinary superiority? Besides, Sawamura cooks for her and Bokuto all the time. It’s not a big deal. “Unless you want to go out instead?”

“No! No, that’s—that sounds good. That’s really nice. Thanks.” Sawamura stands there for another moment, fidgeting with the baseball cap she’s still got clutched in one hand. Then she nods brusquely and follows Kuroo down the stairs.

Kenma herself is nowhere to be found, but Kenma’s parents are in the kitchen, starting to make their own dinner. “Hey, have you seen Kenma?” Kuroo asks, poking her head in the kitchen as she and Sawamura pass by, and Kenma’s mom looks up at her in surprise.

“Oh! You two are still here? She’s gone over to your place already.”

“Ah, right,” says Kuroo, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. Kenma loves hanging out at Kuroo’s house when Kuroo isn’t there. She can spend hours gaming in companionable silence beside Kuroo’s dad as he painstakingly tends to his orchids, and unlike Kenma’s own parents, he never starts dropping pointed hints that maybe she should go get some fresh air. “Okay, thanks. Have a good night.”

“Thank you for having me,” Sawamura tells Kenma’s parents politely, even though she’s been here less than ten minutes.

“Of course. Ah—Tetsu-chan, wait a minute,” says Kenma’s mom, beckoning Kuroo closer while Sawamura goes to put on her shoes. Kuroo obediently steps into the kitchen. Kenma’s mom glances over to Sawamura in the genkan, where she’s sitting on the step to lace up her running shoes; Kenma’s dad appears focused on rinsing rice at the sink, but Kuroo can tell he’s listening too.

“We were doing homework this afternoon,” Kuroo assures Kenma’s parents. “Kenma wasn’t just gaming.”

“Oh—right, that’s good…” Kenma’s mom looks at Sawamura again, and then at the flowers Kuroo has tucked under one arm. She lowers her voice. “Tetsu-chan, is that nice young man your boyfriend? You couldn’t introduce Kenma to some of his friends, could you?”

It requires an act of great willpower to keep a straight face. “I—uh—I’ll see what I can do,” Kuroo manages, before she escapes to put her shoes on and slip out the door after Sawamura.

“What’s so funny?” Sawamura asks, when they make it out onto the street and Kuroo cracks up.

“Nothing, nothing,” says Kuroo, sniggering. “Congratulations, Sawamura. You won Kenma’s parents over with your boyish charms.”

“My what?” says Sawamura.

“It’s your sexy, hardworking farmer vibe—”

“My _what?_ ” says Sawamura.

“They think you’re a nice young country lad making a name for yourself in the big city,” Kuroo explains, relishing the way Sawamura’s face kaleidoscopes through confusion into incredulity and straight on into indignation. “They want you to introduce Kenma to all your hot, eligible farmer friends…”

Sawamura looks at Kuroo for a long moment without saying anything, until Kuroo’s grin gets shaky and her palms start to break out in the nervous sweat she’s learned to associate with receiving Sawamura’s undivided attention and being eternally found wanting. Finally Sawamura just shakes her head and says, “You should hang out with Suga more often. Neither of you ever makes any sense.”

***

Autumn settles over Tokyo, blanketing the city in crimson and gold as the trees change colour. The weather cools, until Kuroo’s breath starts to fog in the early morning air when she runs with Sawamura; the semester draws to an end, prompting daily bouts of academic distress from Bokuto, who has diligently spent all summer doing everything in her power to avoid studying; Kenma finishes _Dark Souls II_ and sinks into a brief post-game slump before fixating on the release news for _Bloodborne_. As the temperature drops, Sawamura starts to pile on the layers, leaving Kuroo in a permanent state of feverish delirium, her heart-rate dangerously elevated.

Autumn also brings with it the next round of qualifiers for the high school spring nationals, which in turn brings Kuroo, Bokuto, and a variety of Nekoma and Fukurodani alumni to the arena to watch their old teams play. Despite Sawamura’s rigid alignment with Nekoma’s sworn rivals, she is magnanimously allowed to tag along.

“Hey, have you and Sawamura gotten better at sex yet?” Bokuto asks when the high school teams are finishing up their lunch break before the afternoon games start. Kuroo and Bokuto have taken their seats again with the rest of their friends; Sawamura is still standing in the aisle, talking with some guy she knows from her job with the youth association.

“ _No_ , and we are not _going to_ , as I’ve explained to you _several times already_ ,” says Kuroo. “We’re better as friends. Well, friendly rivals. It was a mutual decision.”

This is what she has been telling herself, in the hopes that rote repetition will lead to some form of self-hypnosis that will allow her to believe this is actually true. Kuroo still thinks about that high-five in the park, the perfect alignment of their palms, the shock of adrenaline that went spiking right through her. Kuroo still thinks about Sawamura pinning her down and kissing her breathless, the thrill of Sawamura’s hands sliding up her shirt and Sawamura’s hips rolling against hers before things got weird. Kuroo still stares at Sawamura in class (with the new semester, they’ve graduated to Stats II) as Sawamura frowns at the professor and chews on her lip in concentration, scribbling down notes in her small, precise handwriting. Kuroo is still deeply, hopelessly in love.

Bokuto rests her elbow on the arm of her seat and props her head on her hand. While Kenma’s stare always gives Kuroo the impression that Kenma has maxed out her insight stat and now has the ability to astral-project directly into Kuroo’s soul, Bokuto’s face tends to appear open and honest and sometimes a little vacant, which lulls Kuroo into thinking that Bokuto hasn’t been paying much attention to anything going on around her. This is a trap. Bokuto can be even worse than Kenma, as she proves right now when she says, “Sometimes when you look at Sawamura, you open your eyes all the way.”

“So? That’s normal. That’s a normal thing to do with your eyes,” Kuroo says, and shifts uncomfortably in her seat.

“You _never_ open your eyes all the way, though,” says Bokuto. “You always look so sleepy. But then you look at Sawamura, and it’s like _whoooooaaaaa_ —”

“It was a youthful crush. I’m completely over it now,” Kuroo says stiffly.

“You could probably get a manual or something,” Bokuto suggests. “For the sex. Akaashi and I were talking about it the other day. Like, the library’s gotta have something, right?”

“I’m not doing that,” says Kuroo.

“Why not? If you have too many fines, Sawamura could get it out on her card instead—”

“Shut up! I don’t need a manual! I know how to do it!” Kuroo hisses, which is theoretically true. “I said we’re _just friends_ , okay?”

“You cuddled on the train the other day,” Bokuto points out.

“We did _not_. She just put her head on my arm for _maybe_ thirty seconds.” It had been, hands down, the best thirty seconds of Kuroo’s day. She had wandered around campus in a daze afterward, remembering the faint pressure of Sawamura’s parietal resting against her deltoid, scheming up ways to get Sawamura to do it again.

Bokuto glances over at Sawamura, who is still trapped in conversation with the youth association guy. Sawamura has her hands on her hips, nodding intently in response to whatever he’s saying, giving him one-hundred-percent of her attention, the attention Kuroo herself craves so badly all the damn time. Then Bokuto leans in close, her big eyes wide and earnest. “Listen, d’you remember the other day when we all went out for Thai, except they messed up Sawamura’s order and gave her an extra-large bowl instead of just a large? Remember that look she got on her face?”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“Sometimes,” says Bokuto, “when she thinks no one’s watching, she looks at you kinda like that.”

Oh, that’s—that’s just—that’s—Bokuto can’t just go around _saying_ stuff like that, what the—she can’t just reach over and punch Kuroo in her big, stupid, squishy heart—

Kuroo has recovered herself somewhat by the time Sawamura joins them again. Sawamura settles in the seat beside Kuroo and crosses her arms over her chest, leaning forward intently as the Nekoma girls come out onto the court with the other teams to start their warmups. Kuroo sneaks a glance at Sawamura, hoping to catch her looking back. Instead, she notices for the first time the t-shirt Sawamura’s wearing under her open button-up.

“Sawamura,” she says in disbelief, “please tell me you didn’t wear a _Karasuno shirt_ to come cheer on _my_ team?”

Sawamura tugs her button-up open wider to show off the simple _Karasuno High School_ written on upper left. She shoots Kuroo a smug grin and says, “I thought it might help keep your girls motivated. You know, give ‘em something to aspire to.”

“You sicken me,” says Kuroo. She forces herself to look away before she loses the fragile remnants of her mind and kisses that shit-eating grin right off Sawamura’s stupidly handsome face.

***

Kuroo approaches Azumane’s arrival in Tokyo with a façade of neutrality plastered over an ominous sense of foreboding. Sawamura is a little more than _pretty pumped_ about her friend’s relocation; she talks about it non-stop in the weeks leading up, telling Kuroo about the apartment Azumane has found downtown, explaining to Kuroo how much Sugawara is sulking about Azumane abandoning her, asking Kuroo where she should take Azumane to eat for their first time out together. Kuroo is happy for her, honestly, but an unpleasantly jealous part of her brain also insists on iterating resentful, anxious hypotheses about how Azumane will cut into the precious time Kuroo gets with Sawamura. Also, and this is of course just a _minor_ passing observation, but Azumane is very pretty, and has nice long hair and an actual figure with actual boobs. Externally, Kuroo is calm, cool, collected; internally, she is an angry housecat sprinting around in manic circles and yowling at her own reflection.

Just as Kuroo feared, Azumane arrives and Sawamura disappears for a few days, texting back _sorry, busy with Asahi_ or _hey sorry, just saw this_ whenever Kuroo subtly prods her for attention. Kuroo does not mope. No. Moping is beneath her. Instead, she watches a very interesting documentary about particle physics. She looks at Sawamura’s selfie. She eats way too much anpan. She lies on Kenma’s floor and complains about feeling sick from eating way too much anpan. She looks at Sawamura’s selfie again. She makes Bokuto watch the very interesting documentary about particle physics with her (Bokuto falls asleep in minutes). She tries hitting on the hot guy in her economics class, immediately loses interest, and then has to awkwardly extricate herself from his attempts to ask her out. And so on.

What is almost _worse_ is when Sawamura starts inviting Kuroo and Bokuto along on her outings with Azumane. Kuroo knows Azumane from training camp, of course, but Azumane mostly hung out with the other Karasuno girls; she’s a little shy, and her shyness brings out Kuroo’s awkwardness, so whenever Sawamura leaves them unattended they just stand around smiling politely at each other. This is exacerbated by the fact that Kuroo is approximately one-billion-percent certain that Sawamura has told Azumane about the, ah, _intricacies_ of their relationship, likely in detail, so their episodes of politely smiling at each other are overshadowed by the shared yet unacknowledged awareness that Kuroo has had staggeringly terrible sex with Azumane’s best friend.

“It’s so _awkward_ , Kenma,” Kuroo moans after they’ve all been out at a V-league game together one Saturday. “Why is Sawamura doing this to me? Is it some kind of weird power-move?”

“Well, Azumane is Sawamura’s friend,” says Kenma, her nose buried in her PS Vita as they walk to the nearest konbini for snacks.

“Yeah…”

“And you’re Sawamura’s friend.”

“So?”

“So… maybe Sawamura just wants you and Azumane to be friends too…”

“That can’t be right,” says Kuroo, narrowing her eyes. She grabs Kenma’s shoulder and tugs her sideways to stop her from walking into a telephone pole. “Hey, look where you’re going.”

Kenma ignores her, still focused on her game. “Bokuto gets along with Azumane fine,” she points out.

“Bokuto gets along with everyone,” says Kuroo, not envious in the _slightest_. “There has to be some ulterior motive… Sawamura’s up to something…”

“Okay, then maybe she’s planning to drive you wild with unwarranted jealousy until you finally snap and ask her out properly,” says Kenma.

“Ha! No way! I’ll never fall for it!” says Kuroo. Kenma just looks at her and heaves a longsuffering sigh.

Thus, in the interests of outsmarting Sawamura, Kuroo starts making an active effort to befriend Azumane, and is somewhat startled to find that Azumane is actually pretty cool, if you can get her to relax and stop apologizing all over the place. _Take THAT, Sawamura,_ Kuroo thinks absently, grinning as Azumane bemoans the fact that she’s apparently been calling one of her new coworkers at the design studio by the wrong name for three whole weeks.

***

Attending the Tokyo Ramen Show is Sawamura’s idea, backed up with strong support from Bokuto. Kuroo kicks up a fuss out of principle: it’s a long ride on the train; the weather’s supposed to be bad; they know plenty of good places for ramen already; et cetera.

“Well, you don’t have to come,” says Sawamura. “I can just go with Bokuto.”

“Kenma wants to go,” Kuroo says quickly, so she can remain aloof about it without running the risk of getting herself uninvited, and subsequently spends the rest of the week cajoling, begging, and baldly bribing Kenma to attend with them.

“So you and Daichi have some classes together? That’s nice,” Azumane says, when they’re standing around shivering at Komazawa Olympic Park, slurping up steadily cooling ramen from plastic bowls as the wind freezes their fingers. Kenma has given up on socializing entirely and tucked herself inside Kuroo’s jacket for warmth; the muffled music of _Dragon’s Crown_ emanates out of the collar, punctuated by the melodic clatter of combat as Kenma destroys goblins.

“Yeah, we had Stats I for the first two quarters and now we’re in Stats II together,” says Kuroo. She glances over at Sawamura, who’s showing Bokuto and Akaashi something on her phone a couple of feet away, already finished her first bowl. She’s got a puffy vest on over her sweater and a hat pulled down over her ears against the unseasonable cold; the wind has whipped a flush into her cheeks. God, she’s so cute. She’s _so cute_ . It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not _fair_.

“Oh, statistics, right… so have you been helping her out too, then?” Azumane asks.

Kuroo laughs. “Yeah, right. Like she needs help. You know I actually had to _study_ to keep up with her? I’ve still never seen her so much as open the stupid textbook outside of class. It’s infuriating. But I guess you know all about her freaky math genius brain from high school, huh?”

Azumane stares at Kuroo blankly. “Daichi? She’s always been terrible at math. I mean, um, not terrible, she’s better than me, but it was definitely her worst subject.”

Kuroo stares blankly back. “What? Are you sure? She’s been breezing through stats no problem. She even beat me on the Stats I final.”

“Well, yeah, because she spent forever studying for it,” says Azumane, looking at Kuroo a little strangely. “Suga’s spent hours and hours on the phone going over practice problems with her since you guys started university.”

“ _What?_ ” says Kuroo. “But—but she said—but that’s—but—” Kuroo whips around to stare at Sawamura—Sawamura with her nice butt and her extensive wardrobe of athletic clothes—Sawamura who rolls her eyes whenever Kuroo tries to flirt with her, pretending she’s not flustered—Sawamura who comes off as so practical and stern and intimidating—Sawamura who _just barely_ surpassed her in Stats I— _Sawamura who’s terrible at math_. Kuroo analyzes her findings and reaches the only logical conclusion.

“Um, or wait, maybe I wasn’t supposed to—” Azumane is saying, but it’s too late.

“ _Sawamura!_ ” shouts Kuroo, pointing an accusing finger at Sawamura, whose head jerks up in surprise. “You’re in love with me!”

Sawamura’s astonishment morphs into that familiar glower. “Excuse me?”

“You _lied_ about being _good at math_ because you’re _in love with me,_ you _sneaky jerk!_ ”

Sawamura’s face starts going furiously red. She shoves her empty bowl at a stunned Bokuto and steps forward, crossing her arms over her chest. “So what if I am?” she demands. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Oh, you want to know what I’m going to do about it?”

“Yeah, maybe I do!”

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, _Sawamura_ , I’m going to take you over to that stall and I’m going to buy you another bowl of ramen and it’s going to be a _date!_ And you’re going to _like_ it! Because you have a big, fat, stupid _crush_ on me!”

“Fine!” snaps Sawamura.

“And— _and!_ ” says Kuroo, egged on by the weird adrenal cocktail of self-righteous indignation accordioning itself in between heart-stopping terror and spectacular euphoria. “I’m going to _hold your hand!_ ”

“Do it!” says Sawamura, and thrusts out her hand.

“Can you at least unzip me first?” Kenma mumbles from inside Kuroo’s jacket, and Kuroo suddenly becomes aware that she and Sawamura are, in fact, duking out the intricacies of their relationship whilst surrounded by their bewildered friends, in the middle of a major public event.

“Oh yeah, sorry. Uh. We’ll catch up with you guys later?” says Kuroo. She unzips Kenma from her coat. Then, because she said she’d do it and she’s not about to let Sawamura call her on chickening out, she grabs Sawamura’s hand.

“Have fun,” says Kenma. Bokuto, with a ridiculous grin on her face, holds her hand out for a subtle high-five as Kuroo passes; Azumane is frantically texting someone, probably Sugawara; Akaashi is clutching at Bokuto, seemingly on the verge of collapsing to the ground under the sheer weight of her second-hand embarrassment.

“Your palm is really sweaty,” Sawamura mutters as she and Kuroo join the line in front of one of the ramen booths. She’s managed to go even redder, her blush creeping all the way down her neck.

“Your hand is so tense you’re crushing my metacarpals,” Kuroo shoots back. Her heart is pounding like crazy.

“ _Metacarpals?_ You’re such a nerd,” says Sawamura, and rests her head tentatively against Kuroo’s arm.

“Big talk coming from a jock who can’t do math,” says Kuroo, deliriously happy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you have also read my fic [taberu rayu](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25978807/chapters/63156985) you may be wondering if I'm running a singlehanded campaign to Make Math Sexy and if so, why. the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second question is Because It's About Time
> 
> thank you for reading!!! come say hi on tumblr, where I'm <[huntingthehaggis!](huntingthehaggis.tumblr.com)


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